Who will rid us of this totalitarian Prince?

The Prince of Wales, in aiming to be the end of democracy, may yet be the end of the monarchy. Notwithstanding that Europe’s most climate-skeptical party had just come top in the recent UK elections for the European Parliament, he intervened tendentiously in politics – as he now all too frequently does – to demand no less than an end to capitalism as we know it in the name of Saving The Planet from global warming that has not happened for a decade and a half.

The Prince told a meeting of the overpaid and overfed in London that a “fundamental transformation of global capitalism” was necessary in order to halt “dangerously accelerating climate change” that would “bring us to our own destruction”.

That won’t do. Even if “climate change” were “dangerously accelerating” (which it is not, for nearly all the key global indicators – temperature, sea ice, droughts, floods, hurricanes, rainfall, sunshine – show no exceptional trend), an essential duty of a future constitutional monarch is that on all matters of politics he should, as the ancient Greeks used to put it, keep absolute and holy silence.

All parties represented in the UK Parliament are already squandering tens of billions on addressing a non-problem with expensive non-solutions, such as windmills that cause greater CO2 emissions than they abate, and subsidies to all manner of unnecessary, diamond-encrusted boondoggles to make non-existent global warming go away, and madcap proposals such as the multi-billion-dollar deployment of 1500 Flettner-rigged trimarans with Thom fences on the rotating sail cylinders and power from the twin propellers driving atomizers to turn seawater into cloud condensation nuclei and fling them half a mile into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space.

Beam me up, Scotty.

It is not the place of the monarchy to take sides in political debates. A monarchy that allows itself to shuffle, mumbling and whining, down into the political arena and to indulge in advocacy for global totalitarianism on the basis of a flimsy and discredited pseudo-scientific pretext is a monarchy that has forfeited its right to rule.

Charles must go. His future, along with that of the thousand-year monarchy, is in the past. It used to be said there would soon be only five kings in the world: spades, hearts, clubs, diamonds, and England. Scrub that last one.

Charles’ latest speech, whether he knew it or not, was part of a concerted campaign on the part of the international classe politique to persuade the world, with the active assistance of the sycophantic Marxstream media, to agree to a binding treaty by which sovereign nations would abandon their right to set their own environmental policy and allow a vast, entirely unelected international bureaucracy to rule them all.

To all who love democracy, this prospect is terrifying. The increasing brazenness and frequency of the lies being told about the climate, from Prince Charles’ more than usually ridiculous speech to the daftly hysterical climate assessments recently issued by Mr Obama and by Britain’s oldest taxpayer-funded pressure-group, the Royal Society, shows how desperate the totalitarians are to persuade the world to let them establish for the first time a global regime of absolute power wielded by supranational institutions entirely beyond the reach of any electorate.

The Founding Fathers of the United States foresaw many things when, in that long, hot Philadelphia summer, they drew up the Constitution. But they did not foresee that the United States, like many other nations, would come to be governed by people whose personal ambitions lay far beyond her shores, for they are global ambitions.

These global ambitions are not to extend nobly in the international sphere the athletic democracy that is their nation’s great gift to itself and to humanity, but instead to use the motive power of speciously-generated fear and the artifice of international treaty-making with like-minded totalitarians in other nations to bind their successors, and to bind the elected Congress in perpetuity without regard to the changing science or to the changing will of any future electorate.

The draft global climate treaty that failed in Copenhagen in 2009 failed in no small part because details of the draft had become public scant weeks before the conference began. There was a justifiable public outcry against it.

At the Durban climate conference in 2011 a further attempt at introducing a ruthless, intrusive and pernickety regime of global control was made, but again it was exposed publicly, exclusively, and in detail here at WattsUpWithThat. That posting became the most widely-read of some 500,000 on WordPress worldwide on the day of publication.

The junta that furtively directs the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change saw from these examples that conducting its affairs in public, as it is mandated to do, would prevent it from establishing its intended regime of absolute control. For if the mere people knew what it was up to they would not endure it.

At the 2012 climate conference in Doha, when I tried to obtain a draft of the Chairman’s conclusions – an always revealing document previously available at every conference but never reported on by journalists – a smirking clerk told me that no such document existed. The UNFCCC, twice before humiliated when its plans for world domination had been exposed, had scuttled, cockroach-like, underground.

Monckton of Arabia, Doha, 2012. The camel is the one on the right.

So now it is a race between the slow, inexorable emergence of the truth that the weather does not and will not change at the predicted rate or to the predicted degree and the vast army of princes, potentates, plutocrats, paper-pushers and pusillanimous panty-waists who have long wearied of democracy and have been quietly misusing the treaty-making power and abusing the scientific method with the undeclared but undeniable aim of eradicating all but the appearance of democracy, worldwide.

The day before yesterday, one nation might adopt Fascism, another Socialism, another Communism, another theocracy, another democracy. The systems competed, and democracy prevailed. The day after tomorrow, if the unholy alliance prevails, there will be one system, and no competition.

While competition existed, the totalitarians were seen off. Like it or not, the Berlin Wall came down. Yet they did not accept their defeat. They took over Greenpeace and other environmental groups and turned them into what have become, in all but name, totalitarian front groups whose real aim is not environmental but political.

That aim is the worldwide annihilation of the democratic and capitalist system that, for all its faults, has delivered more happiness and more benefit – in economic terms, more utility – to more people than any other political or economic disposition the world has known.

The Prince of Wales has morphed into just one more dirigiste, etatiste contre-capitaliste. His speech was framed as a warning – and it is just that: a warning that he and his ilk are intending over the next 18 months to bully or badger or bribe the world into ceding all political power by treaty to them and to those whom they approve. Ballot-box? What’s that? Never heard of it.

Consider the following sentence:

“Over the next 18 months, and bearing in mind the urgency of the situation confronting us, the world faces what is probably the last effective window of opportunity to vacate the insidious lure of the ‘last chance saloon’ in order to agree an ambitious, equitable and far-sighted multilateral settlement in the context of the post-2015 sustainable development goals and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

Sometimes, mixed metaphors are entertaining. This one is merely leaden. We face (but do not pass through) a window of opportunity, then we vacate a lure (this is entirely without meaning), then we do not call in at the last-chance saloon (surely the Prince’s intention was to visit the last-chance saloon rather than missing the bus and failing to catch the tide?).

His is the bloodless, alien tongue of those who have conceived so total a contempt for democracy that they cannot wait to stifle it under a mountain of treaties and carbon controls and reporting requirements and quotas and taxes and subsidies and regulations and restrictions and Thou-Shalt-Nots.

And the Press will not come to the aid of the people. Before the Second World War, they near-unanimously fawned upon Hitler. After it, they near-unanimously fawned upon Stalin.

Now, they near-unanimously fawn upon the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the European Union, and a Lernaean Hydra of pampered, me-too, supranational bureaucracies whose defining characteristic is that not one of them is answerable either via the ballot-box to any electorate or via the courts to any jurisdiction.

Patrick Henry

This is a dangerous moment. All that the Founding Fathers of the United States had sought to achieve may very soon be set at naught. The irony is that in the plot to repudiate and repeal freedom and democracy and the cheerful chaos of the market-place the current leadership in the United States has enthusiastically made common cause with the very monarchy that the American Revolution so vigorously sought to supplant.

The year before that great Revolution, in St. John’s Church, Virginia, Patrick Henry cried, “Give me liberty or give me death!” In the coming months, unless we are very careful and very vigilant, it will not be the former.

Oh, I don’t like the sound of this Lord Monckton. I knew Prince Charles was an organic farmer, and I agree with this myself to improve the soil etc. and crop or livestock production. I think her Majesty might have to shut him up, he is way off track of a constitutional monarchy’s rights to comment on political themes. In someways each country should attempt to improve their landscape where we grow crops etc., and pollution, but should not be under the supervision of others who are foreigners and do not understand our particular environment and micro- climates. Didn’t the Kyoto agreement try to do this?

Stuart Kings, Execrable Stuart Kings! There were too many named Charles and too many named James. Charles the 3rd and you’re out. I suggest he take the regal name Stewart on his ascension. King Stewart the last. He has the arrogance of James I, the political deftness of Chas I (Charles the short), the wretched private life of Chas. II and the fanaticism of James II.
Please your royal highness, please be quiet, just shut up.

The English already solved the “Charles” problem. The modern Charles has already lost his head. What’s past is prologue:
In 1629, he dismissed parliament and resolved to rule alone. He was found guilty and executed on 30 January 1649 outside the Banqueting House on Whitehall, London.
He declared that he had desired the liberty and freedom of the people as much as any, “but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having government … It is not their having a share in the government; that is nothing appertaining unto them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things.”[273] At about 2 p.m.,[275] Charles put his head on the block after saying a prayer and signalled the executioner when he was ready by stretching out his hands; he was then beheaded with one clean stroke.[276

Thanks, Christopher, Lord Monckton.
These are certainly interesting times, the red tide is raising and the omens are bad for the people.
We see all over the world the terrible consequences of totalitarianism, but the forces of reason are not asleep, as has been demonstrated: “Europe’s most climate-skeptical party had just come top in the recent UK elections for the European Parliament”.

I knew Prince Charles was an organic farmer
==============
oh yes, we see him out in the fields every day. Tending the crops, taking them to market, haggling to get the best price. Ever so fine in his chauffeured Bentley, driving round with the turnips and cabbages in the boot.

King Henry VIII had syphilis – mayhap Bonnie Prince of Wales Charlie has some organic disorder?
Lord Monckton, your insights are priceless. Yes. Obama, Kerry and company are what we Americans fought a revolution 238 years ago to overthrow – and what we Americans and you Britons stood shoulder to shoulder to crush 70 years ago, and to topple 25 years ago. If only we had once more a Ronald Reagan and an Iron Lady – perhaps the greatest team in defense of freedom ever.
Global warming alarmism is indeed only about totalitarian ambitions; it has never been about the environment, the more so given how anti-environmental all the “green” initiatives are.
I salute you, Lord Monckton, for your commitment to liberty and democracy – and honest science.

Well Cromwell was NOT much better, he ruled as an absolute dictator until his timely death. His son took over and was abolished. I know a bit about this period as one of my very distant ancestors signed Charles I death warrant, a reluctant one admittedly, Symon Mayne. Cromwell wanted to ban Christmas or rather change it, non of the pagan stuff. Christmas puds, etc. Anyway, I don’t think people give Charles POW, much credence, but like his father Prince Phillip suffer from verbal stupid stuff sometimes, that makes one believe that they are out of touch sometimes and should shut up when airing their one sided opinions.

Always nice to meet another historian.
==========
Sovereigns that forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. A figurehead keeps its head only so long as it remembers it is only a figurehead. Otherwise, in seeking to figure, it risks loosing its head.

Why would he want to do anything that even had a chance of transmitting syphilis?
To get that you have to (1) want to have s. relations with somebody else you know closely.
(2) have somebody else want to have s. relations with you.
Ain’t neither likely. 8<)

Ear heir by written will will wow the numbers into lines of 10 and ear the heir counts the 10’s in his sleep to keep the lay of the lyer in tune with the unkown facts of the will to writ it all down in 97% prose too.
[The mods cannot figure out if anything else but “unknown” is misspelled in the above, but are afraid to touch any of it…. 8<) .mod]

@bushbunny
And my ancestor, Colonel Daniel Axtell, was Captain of the Guard at Charles’s Trial….and ultimately died a traitors death in 1660 after being exempted from Charles II pardon of the Regicides. He also hired Charles executioner. I would recommend an excellent book by British barrister Geoffrey Robinson, “The Tyrannicide Brief”. It may surprise you to see in it a theme of early Republican ideals expressed by Cromwell and his New Model Army..though they hardly lived up to those ideals.
Nice to hear from another ‘Puritan colleague’

Unfortuntely for us he is indeed somewhat intellectually challenged. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t comel up with such garbage. To be honest the best thing would be for him to become king here he will have to do the very thing he does not want to do, which is shut up.

@Alan Poirier, ferdberple –
I, too am a historian (Ph.D., UC Santa Barbara, 1970) – and I’ve found my lifelong reading in the history of past eras to be a powerful reinforcer of my skepticism concerning global warming – to the extent that I can say with confidence that the historical record alone is sufficient to debunk the global warming meme. Temperatures and human activity alike are very well documented for prior warm and cold periods, completely blowing away the lie that CO2 causes climate change to any measurable extent.

Prince Charles did quote sometime back, that when he became king, he could not comment on certain issues like he can as Prince of Wales. Queen Elizabeth can not comment on political issues and stays apolitical.

An interesting question: is our dim Prince genuinely persuaded that a climate crisis exists?
Who knows what information penetrates the bubble he exists in?
Or, is he a true Totalitarian?
Bearing in mind this plot’s been afoot for Centuries, I’d guess the web’s been tightly woven around this not overbright chap.
Google: May 1st, 1776 for some surprises.

Warren, my ancestor died in the tower, where he had to stay as part punishment, but only for short periods. He died of pneumonia. My mother always hated royalty, although I do believe in a constitutional monarchy. I think without the Royal family, Great Britain and other places would be a rather duller place, especially British weather!

Prince Charles did quote sometime back, that when he became king, he could not comment on certain issues like he can as Prince of Wales.
==============
the best guide to how a person will act in the future is how they have acted in the past.

Chad me too, but my major was archaeology and palaeoanthropology, plus ancient history. I didn’t get a Ph.D though, but following history can be helpful, and like you when Gore started his rant about global warming and got the Nobel prize, I nearly spewed up. What did the archaeologist say in Michael Crichton’s ‘Timeline’ novel? …. “Without a knowledge of history, one is a leaf that does not realize you belong to a tree’. I like that.

Maybe someone agrees with me, but if some serious global event is imminent, the worst thing is to ignore it and head in the wrong direction, trying to avoid it the inevitable. I’m referring to an impending glacial period or mini ice age. I can’t believe, knowing and studying what I have at tertiary level, that scientists, well some, are stuck on the philosophy that the globe is warming uncontrollably. We are more likely to be effected by a critical global cooling than warming!

The basic story is that Adam Weishaupf, a Jesuit, accepted a commission from Rothschild to prepare a plan to take over the World.
He came back with a 25 point strategy.
The first two were: control the media, & ruin the youth through drugs & sex.
Too fantastic?
What do you think we’re looking at now?
Youtube, & put in Whistleblower Head of FBI Tells all from NWO 1 Hour 4 mins.
Ted L Gunderson, would not shut up about what he’d learned. He died of arsenic poisoning.
Book: “Pawns in the Game.” William Guy Carr.

I wish they would teach history properly in schools. My daughter’s generation and my grandson’s generation have no idea of what progress we’ve made since industrialization. They have no appreciation what the deindustrialization of North America has done to the middle class and so, now, have no idea what decarbonization will do to our respective economies.

If the role of the monarchy has become moral guidance, then it is inevitable that at some point the morality of the monarchy will become confused with the science. This has been the problem for thousands of years, most damage to societies and to science has been done in the name of some or other apparently moral cause or agenda. Even Socrates was put to death for ‘turning the youth away from the gods’.
And if the monarchy isn’t there for moral guidance, then why is it there at all?

bushbunny says:
May 30, 2014 at 9:18 pmI’m referring to an impending glacial period or mini ice age.
If it were true, there will be species such as insects who would be in preparation for a long hibernation, you know, species who have evolved through millions of years of practice.

If that ‘last effective window of opportunity’ that ‘last chance saloon’ passes without the ‘far-sighted multilateral settlement’ will that be it, will he please shut up and go away or will the deadline simply be rescheduled or recast as is typical of bat-crazy doomsday cultists? … Don’t answer.

jdseanjdAn interesting question: is our dim Prince genuinely persuaded that a climate crisis exists?
Who knows what information penetrates the bubble he exists in?
Or, is he a true Totalitarian?
Both. I think he genuinely cares, I was a volunteer for a charity he set up for a while. The problem is he is totally convinced he is right, that the world is a worse place today than it was say 100 years ago, or better still 2-300 years ago, when people lived “in tune” with nature, like hobbits out of Tolkein’s “Lord of the Rings”.
He blames industrialisation and globalisation for distracting people from the values of a gentler age.
The part he overlooks is that life in those times was nasty, brutish and short, that people were one failed harvest away from disaster. His vision is villagers gently living fulfilling lives of gentle harmony, but the reality is more like the way people live these days in Africa. If you want to know what life was really like before technology, take a trip to Chad or Sudan. If you survive, you will have a very different view of the idyllic lives of our ancestors.

“This is a dangerous moment. All that the Founding Fathers of the United States had sought to achieve may very soon be set at naught. The irony is that in the plot to repudiate and repeal freedom and democracy and the cheerful chaos of the market-place the current leadership in the United States has enthusiastically made common cause with the very monarchy that the American Revolution so vigorously sought to supplant.
The year before that great Revolution, in St. John’s Church, Virginia, Patrick Henry cried, “Give me liberty or give me death!” In the coming months, unless we are very careful and very vigilant, it will not be the former.”
____________________________
Lord Monckton may rest assured that modern minutemen are everywhere, the spiritual sons and daughters of those farmers who stood at Lexington and Yorktown.They are making their silent presence known by the fact that for18 months now, ammunition and all components to assemble ammo such as rifle powder, bullets, etc have been in such unusually high demand that they are scarce by that demand, sold almost as quickly as they can be unpacked in stores, despite elevated costs, despite manufacturers running at full production. Our citizens are stockpiling arms and ammunition. There is a reason for that…

“His is the bloodless, alien tongue of those who have conceived so total a contempt for democracy that they cannot wait to stifle it under a mountain of treaties and carbon controls and reporting requirements and quotas and taxes and subsidies and regulations and restrictions and Thou-Shalt-Nots.”
Christopher, thou hast outdone even thyself! Marvellous plum of insight-sodden prose.

KING CHARLIE
Rue Britannia! Here comes your king!
The leaden will replace the gold!
He’s something of a feckless thing
And something of a nasty scold
The scepter of too great a weight
His head too small to fit the crown
And swaddled in the robes of state!
The monarchy is sizing down
Eugene WR Gallun

Monckton, you are a silver tongued devil.
But I fear not the totalitarian nightmare you see on the horizon. Oh, it is there all right, absolutely. Those who grasp for power have indeed bent the fear of CAGW to their will, with crony capitalists and crony socialists alike as eager partners. But in the end, I say they will fail.
Why? Because I believe in the selfishness of people, both as individuals and nations. Moscow will not sign up for draconian measures at end of day, nor will China. Germany, furiously building coal powered power plants to replace their nuclear ones, cannot. Italy, Spain, and Greece, are all near bankruptcy as it is, and will face riots and perhaps rebellion of their economies get any worse, so they will not sign either. The dictatorships of Africa and the middle east and elsewhere will not step up unless bribed with wealth xfers to do so, and there simply isn’t enough money in the western world bribe them all. The oil rich nations won’t sign up, they’d be bankrupting themselves if they did.
So when the wrangling and negotiating and bargaining and blustering has run its course, it will be only a handful of free countries left clinging to the insane idea that they, through control of their own emissions, can make a lick of difference in how the rest of the word is being run. The harsh reality is that the truly evil regimes of the world are playing the west for the fools they are will become obvious to all but the most obtuse of decision makers, perhaps even Barak Obama himself will clue in, though I doubt it.
The free world will not be saved by a leader who brought it to its senses, but by selfish dictators who make decisions based on what is best for them in here and now. There are enough of them that Obama and company can mo more negotiate a treaty with them than they could with pack of rabbid dogs. The west sill stay sane not because it stepped back from insanity, but because their parth will be thwarted by the most evil regimes on the planet.

Modern British Fascism is emerging, blinking and blushing into the sunlight, and like HRH, is not a pretty sight. The elite are part of the new fascist creed in the EU. Renewable energy is all about benefitting landowners, renewables corporations and carbon trading enterprises. The latter include fossil fuel groups like Shell, who have set out to keep the energy in the ground and convert themselves into banks and commodity traders, centred on the new commodity, carbon.
These people own the politicians and the politicians’ relatives have their snouts in the trough; Cameron’s in-laws, Clegg’s wife, Miliband’s wife, Brown’s brother, Davey’s brother, Huhne’s personal interests, etc. etc. So, the peoples of Europe are now waking up to this new Corporatist fascist state which will in turn introduce Eugenics as part of its aim to own all the wealth and make the people into serfs.
The worst UK political party is the Liberal Democrats, infiltrated 25 years’ ago by people whose relatives, ex ‘Blackshirts’, supporters of the pre-WWII British Union of Fascists, set up the ‘Soil Association’ in Coventry; organic farming and renewables. One founder, Jorian Jenks, was a personal friend of Hitler’s Agricultural Minister who worked with ‘Blud und Boden’. In Austria, the Freedom Party, which had been their Liberal Democrats, is now openly fascist. HRH’s organic farming seems to have been part of a much bigger political picture.
The IPCC scam, renewable energy and carbon trading is outright fascism; the state granting monopolies for private profit. Gillard set out to do the same for the Aussie Unions. Ukip is a movement of the people which doesn’t realise yet that it is anti-fascist. In political terms, we are now at 1935 when the British Establishment last woke up to fascism developing in their midst. That was when T E Lawrence (of Arabia) was probably assassinated by German agents as a potential leader against the Greater Reich. Go to where Lawrence is buried at Clouds Hill in Dorset: there is a photograph of the cortège, led by Winston Churchill; the expression on Churchill’s face shows he foresaw what that probable assassination meant.
The infiltration of the Liberal democrats was organised by the stepson of the 1930s’ leader of the pro-Nazi group in the British Establishment, the then Governor of the Bank of England. The latter went on to control the Tavistock Institute which set up the New Wold Order. its influence on history has been enormous as it has created modern fascism: http://educate-yourself.org/nwo/nwotavistockbestkeptsecret.shtml
These people also indoctrinated students doing PPE at Oxford. HRH’s estate is near that of his mentor, Jonathan Porritt, who, as part of Friends of the Earth, also did the Oxford indoctrination of people like Cameron and Davey, currently Energy and Climate Change Minister. The gloves are off: the Global Elite want to kill your relatives in order to fulfil the dream of Adolf Hitler.

Garfy:
Thanks for suggesting Marcel Leroux. Sadly only the more successful (evidently doomed by HRH) capitalists among us will want to buy “Global Warming – Myth or Reality?: The Erring Ways of Climatology” priced at Amazon UK at £233.50 or around $390 for the hard copy and £185 / $319 for the Kindle version.
Perhaps they should rush out and grab a copy while they can.

the list of those who have declined titles or given them up look better company that the list of those who hold them. Monarchy is a role game.If you do not like your ‘role’ why play the game? As PC said a while ago people should know their place.

The damage was done when Ted Heath treasonously[1] repealed the Statute of Praemenire[2] in the 1967 Criminal Law Act.
[1] Treason because he “compassed the death of the Monarch” insomuch as the Queen
ceased to be the highest power in the land – she became a European citizen.
[2] which protected UK subjects from being summoned to foreign courts (ie the Pope.)

charlie’s soul-mates, Monbiot & Grantham:
28 May: Guardian: George Monbiot: It’s simple. If we can’t change our economic system, our number’s up
It’s the great taboo of our age – and the inability to discuss the pursuit of perpetual growth will prove humanity’s undoing
Let us imagine that in 3030BC the total possessions of the people of Egypt filled one cubic metre. Let us propose that these possessions grew by 4.5% a year. How big would that stash have been by the Battle of Actium in 30BC? This is the calculation performed by the investment banker Jeremy Grantham…
Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues miraculously vanished, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible…
It was neither capitalism nor communism that made possible the progress and pathologies (total war, the unprecedented concentration of global wealth, planetary destruction) of the modern age. It was coal, followed by oil and gas. The meta-trend, the mother narrative, is carbon-fuelled expansion. Our ideologies are mere subplots. Now, with the accessible reserves exhausted, we must ransack the hidden corners of the planet to sustain our impossible proposition…
On Friday, a few days after scientists announced that the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet is now inevitable, the Ecuadorean government decided to allow oil drilling in the heart of the Yasuni national park…http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/27/if-we-cant-change-economic-system-our-number-is-up

Charles has always been susceptible to a conga line of loons, whether they give spiritual, ‘scientific’, political or moral advice.
His latest regurgitations, including the insulting “headless chickens” comments, have seen him lose considerable respect and support from among the better educated of his mother’s subjects.
Now there must be few supporters to shield him from the eggs and tomatoes which will inevitably come his way as he proceeds to insult people much smarter than his less-than-royal self.
Let’s hope the succession runs Elizabeth II to William V.

HRH is free to express his opinions on any branch of philosophy that he likes, not to mention other areas of study or enterprise. Just as long as he separates them from politics and that he encourages honest inquiry.

He got 5 or 6 O levels, and a couple of crap A levels*:https://www.royal.gov.uk/ThecurrentRoyalFamily/ThePrinceofWales/Education.aspx
So he’s not a complete buffoon /sarc off
Surely though, the fact that the heir to the throne has to be a neomonarchist is the most delicious irony of all ??
God save the Queen !!!!
*He wouldn’t even have got into East Anglia, let alone Cambridge, with that sh!t showing and without the Royal pull. The inbred retread (sp?) might’ve even had trouble getting into a Polytechnic at that time.

Is there a parallel here with Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia for fair winds for his attack on Troy and Charles sacrificing his nation for better growing conditions for his brassicas? I fear so, but, then, he never was too bright!

Given that their million dollar climate models run on ten million dollar supercomputers claim that all water vapor added to the sky increases warming rather than becomes clouds, those adult toy boats are likely just meant to create to very warming they gleefully fantasize about befalling us.
Appreciate that the Marxism being pushed so hard in college liberal arts requirements along with anti-science postmodernism is a unicorn world Utopianism, much like the 1960s idealism associated LSD spiritualism with world peace. As Marx himself avoided real work, he spun stories about everyday citizens jaunting about in paradise, one month being an opera singer, then switching freely to being a pilot, on a whim. Marxism is now reinvigorated in our relative decadent age as absolute levels of wealth keep hiking up and obesity now threatens as many lives as starvation, for the first time in history, all the while base human nature allows envy of smaller and smaller status differences to inflame bored voters into cheering on Inquisitional doomsday cult demagogues based on spectator sport tribalism, very primitively.
“It is what Zola calls triomphe de la médiocrité. Snobs, nobodies, take the place of workers, thinkers, artists; and it isn’t even noticed. The public, yes, one part of it is dissatisfied, but material grandeur also finds applause; however, do not forget that this is merely a straw fire, and that those who applaud generally do so only because it has become the fashion. But on the day after the banquet, there will be a void a silence and indifference after all that noise.” – Vincent van Gogh (letter to Theo van Gogh, 1882)
“If Karl, instead of writing a lot about Capital, made a lot of Capital, it would have been much better.” – Henrietta Marx, mother of Karl

” establish for the first time a global regime of absolute power wielded by supranational institutions entirely beyond the reach of any electorate.”
And equally as important beyond any auditalbe accountability or judicial control.

out! out! brief candle
life’s but an open window
an I must jump back thru it now
see yuh
respectfully an unrespectfully
sgd) bob dylan
Closing lines of his apology to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, December 1963 (since we are considering mixed metaphors)
Also I would respectfully suggest that Monckton of Arabia ought to ride a Brough Superior rather than a methane emitting camel.

Just think of this: This twat reached retirement age without EVER having a job. That says it all about him. His mother knew well that he would have ended the family jobline if he had ever got to be King. You have to admire her understanding of that. It must eat away at him, that not only did he throw away a wife that he didn’t deserve, and shack up with a woman looking like she has discovered a dog turd in her handbag, he has to daily live with the knowledge that his own mother didn’t think he was up to the King job. He will go down in history as one of the shortest-reign Kings (if he ever gets there), and that brings me great joy, as I can’t stand the twat.

More absurdity from an unfulfilled man stuck in the waiting room of life. And why is it always the ‘last chance’ to fix, solve or prevent an alleged serious threat? Oh yeah, because it’s a desperate call to action to bully people into hasty decisions that on cooler, calmer reflection are exposed as simply not being required.
Climate Fraud and noble cause corruption has seduced presidents, prime ministers and now princes. Off your head, your Royal Highness!

I don’t like that Prince, but I dislike totalitarianism under the guise of Democracy.
Stop pretending that Democracy is anything to aspire to or that we indeed possess a capitalist system–we don’t; we live under corporatism.

Me to the wife: “In a galaxy of dim bulbs Obama’s glows least bright”. Poignant, I thought. Says she, “I doubt it glows at all”. Trump.
There is no corner in the universe of perverse notions the deluded are unwilling to mine. From those nether regions of bankrupt thought we are given the vacuous idiation of the 97% consensus believers. Shouting their conscription to über alles, climate first and last above human misery, theirs is the religion of fools and charlatans, of politicians corrupted by noble cause, and all the while taxes taken from a weary working class are to be squandered to fuel a fool’s errand.
America – don’t vote like that. It is self-defeating.

All this goes to show that the skeptics (realists) in the debate are losing ground in my opinion. As the evidence and science unravels against CAGW, the message becomes more important. I fear that most people on this site are rationalists – and seek to engage on that basis. The fact is that most intelligent people do not participate in the debate and listen only to the official MSM message – and really do not think that this topic is remotely important enough to do their own research.
“WUWT” and the skeptical community generally frames its arguments either in terms of science or the abuse of science that is perceived. The issue has moved on way past science which is now almost irrelevant.When the White House is promoting panic every time it rains or snows or whatever you can see where this is heading and who is calling the shots.
The challenge is now to figure out and derail the political agenda – with all the odds stacked against you. There are plenty of “useful idiots” in the world – just as there were plenty of folk prepared to believe in the USSR 1930’s workers’ paradise. But of course the science is settled and to go against 97% we all must be wrong thinking and probably in need of re-education…

The Prince told a meeting of the overpaid and overfed in London that a “fundamental transformation of global capitalism” was necessary in order to halt “dangerously accelerating climate change” that would “bring us to our own destruction”.

🙂
The frugal Prince Charles has also been heard saying – “We are making it cool to use less stuff” – in order to fight climate change. Let’s see what he has done to save the planet from ‘dangerous’ warming. See my references for everything stated below.
In a speech he gave to industrialists and environmentalists at his James’s Palace in 2009 he said that the “age of convenience” was over. He added that we have just 96 months to avert “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.” In 2007 he was labelled an eco-hypocrite by environmental campaigners for planning a 7,000 mile convenient round trip by on a jumbo jet with 20 of his staff to the USA to accept an environmental award.
For his further convenience he has “161.1 full-time equivalent staff” and 4 “homes in England, Scotland and Wales.” Clarence House – 40,000 sq. feet, Highgrove Estate – 900 acres.http://youtu.be/zhpNJAKq7dE

marcjf says:May 31, 2014 at 12:53 am
“All this goes to show that the skeptics (realists) in the debate are losing ground ……The challenge is now to figure out and derail the political agenda…….”
I tend to agree with your comment especially with that part which says “The issue has moved on way past science which is now almost irrelevant. When the White House is promoting panic every time it rains or snows or whatever you can see where this is heading and who is calling the shots.”
However, the solution IMHO, is to just wait. This cannot go on forever. The longest it can take is until our economy collapses and the political class pushing the agent disappears into oblivion, same as the Soviet empire collapsed within a few months. It may take a while, but when it happens it will be very quick.

It is noteworthy that also climbing onto this latest bandwagon, was Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, together with former Goldman Sachs man Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England. As governor of the Bank of Canada, he was instrumental in awarding George Soros the Canadian International Council Globalist of the Year Award in 2010.
Soros and Lagarde were both on Ban Ki Moon’s High Level Climate Finance Panel set up after Copenhagen, by UNFCC’s Christiana Figueres to garner $100 billion a year by 2020 for “Sustainable Development in Developing Nations”, as was carbon trading advisor Lord Stern. Figueres worked as a senior advisor to Stern’s IdeaCarbon group prior to joining the UN and she has been “trained by Al Gore” to deliver “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Prince Charles is part of the all encompassing network, after all it was his father who was involved in setting up WWF.
Check out “High Level Climate Finance – The Key to Global Governance”http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/high_level_climate_finance.html
Also, “The United (Socialist) Nations – Progress on Global Governance via Climate Change, Sustainable Devlopment and Bio-Diversity”http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/un_progress_governance_via_climate_change.html
More of the UN (and US) agenda can be seen here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/changing_global_economy_engine.html

The Guardian – 28 February 2012Prince Charles to get funding from ‘blot on the landscape’ windfarms
Upkeep of Clarence House and some travel costs to be paid from income on crown estate, which rents out land for turbines
……..Prince Charles is set to benefit from the erection of onshore windfarms in England and Wales despite once declaring them a “horrendous blot on the landscape”.
Under a change in funding arrangements for the royal household due to come into effect next year, the upkeep of his London home, Clarence House, and the costs of his official trips on private charter jets and the royal train will be funded through income from the crown estate, which leases out land for the largest onshore windfarm in the south of England at Romney Marsh. It is also planning several more in Wales and Lincolnshire that could together deliver £1m a year in revenues.
The prince is understood to be strongly opposed to onshore wind turbines that rise higher than 100 metres because of their visual impact, and none have been erected on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, the £700m estate that provides him with a private income……http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/28/prince-charles-windfarm-funding

So now it is a race between the slow, inexorable emergence of the truth that the weather does not and will not change at the predicted rate or to the predicted degree and the vast army of princes, potentates, plutocrats, paper-pushers and pusillanimous panty-waists…..

And this is very important. They know it’s a race against time. Not because they know they are right, but because they know they are wrong. They need to set up the international bodies and regulations before they are undeniably shown to be wrong. That is why we have “the oceans ate my global warming” and ‘the standstill is just temporary’. I have been aware of this race for some time now and Booker of the Telegraph once said that the truth and weather is on our side.

Pointman – May 22, 2014
There was to be no debate but it fell foul of that rebellious child it largely shaped, the skeptic blogosphere, which insisted on taking a can opener to every hermetically sealed debate, and so often found Blake’s great red dragon of chaos ready to emerge from it grinning in triumph.
By now, they were increasingly desperate men in a hurry towards some finishing line only they could see, and acted accordingly. It’s not very hard to get inside that.

PS I forgot that many also have co2 related investments. Big money is about to be lost and much has been already. Carbon this and carbon that. See Stern, Oxborough, Charles et al. and the failing carbon markets.
Remember all the above when you hear their desperate calls for action. Scientific shame and money. Shame because they called us nasty names. Money, well money lost. Heh, heh.

“The market system is not functional,” insisted the chairman, Sir Crispin Tickell, incidentally, one of Prince Charles’ most trusted advisers. The strategy should be for each country to achieve self-sufficiency through a mixture of production subsidies, import controls and rationing (that last bit wasn’t actually spelled out, but I’m blowed if I can see how else you are going to persuade people to eat less).http://tinyurl.com/q57cua6
Crispin Tickell (One of Principal Godfathers of the CAGW Scam )http://judithcurry.com/2013/08/11/climate-science-sociology/#comment-364124
Tickelled Greenhttp://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/02/tickelled-green.html
Dominic Lawson: A retort to the population control freaks
I don’t accept the assumption that this country is unbearably overcrowded – or would be at 71m
I was surprised to hear Sir Crispin Tickell citing 20 million as the appropriate number of residents for the UK; only four years ago, on BBC 2′s Newsnight, he spoke in support of a figure of 30 million. Numbers, numbers. In his earlier broadcast, Sir Crispin remarked: “Someone has said that constantly increasing growth is the doctrine of the cancer cell. You just get out of control.”
This metaphor, in effect describing the birth of children as like a metastasising tumour, is truly disgusting. Who, though, was that “someone” Sir Crispin airily quoted? His name is Paul Ehrlich and he is a patron, along with Tickell and Sir Jonathon Porritt, among others, of the Optimum Population Trust, an organisation that campaigns tirelessly for an organised reduction in human life.http://tinyurl.com/kype72r

I have much sympathy for Prince Charles, who has the world’s most frustrating job, but he fails to appreciate WHY he is supposed to be non-political: once you open your mouth Your R,H., about half the world will disagree with you. I agreed about Putin, but disagree strongly about AGW.
Long live the Queen….

“Over the next 18 months, and bearing in mind the urgency of the situation confronting us, the world faces what is probably the last effective window of opportunity to vacate the insidious lure of the ‘last chance saloon’…….

The Vancouver Sun – May 11, 1982Lack of such action would bring “by the turn of the century, an envi-ronmental catastrophe which will witness devast-tation as complete, as ir-reversible as any……”
[Mostafa Tolba – Executive director of the UNEP]
===============
Moscow-Pullman Daily News – 5 July 1989
“governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.”
[Noel Brown – New York office of UNEP]
===============
New York Times – November 18, 2007
…..The IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and economist from India, acknowledged the new trajectory. “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late,” Pachauri said. “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”…..

Yet we always seem to be magically getting one last chance at the last again, last chance saloon. LOL. Climate clowns.

“”pete ross says:
May 31, 2014 at 1:20 am
He, the prince that is, also talks to his potted plants. Potty isn’t it. poor thing.””
Now that is the one sensible thing the man does. He is breathing CO2 onto his plants at 40,000ppm and the plants LOVE IT! Do it myself in fact.

If you have ever ridden a Brough Superior, you would not want to wish the experience onto anyone else. It was a fast bike for it’s era but at 200K for an example actually owned by T. E. lawrence there is incomparibly better on offer for a great deal less. The Brough Superior has recently been re launched but it is merely a marketing ploy playing on a very old reputation. If you want to suggest a fast sports Vee twin a Ducati or K.T.M. are excellent, if you want to suggest a fast sports bike look to any modern manufacturer except Harley Davidson and other manfacturers of their ilk.

We have just emerged from one of, if not THE biggest financial earthquakes in history and less than a decade later we are seeing things return to normal. Countries did not fall, people did not die in their millions, the revolutionaries have been largely ignored. Communism is dead in all but the ‘greenest’ of countries and only the most brutal of regimes can keep capitalism from flourishing. Even the Ukrainian conflict is partly about which capitalist horse (EU or Russia) to back.
Capitalism works because the people at the top need the people at the bottom to have stuff, make stuff and sell stuff. The drive for the people at the bottom is to be increasingly inventive or hard working and so grab more of life’s goodies. The motivation for the people at the top is the more happy productive people they have, the more of life’s goodies exist to roll their way. Even a modest earner in the west can have luxuries that would have been worth more than a kingdom in the past, even if those things had existed at all. Are we going to give all that up on the say so of a few hypocritical dreamers?
And they are dreamers. They have no fixed ideas for their supposed utopia, where we live sustainably. They don’t even have a definition of where reasonable consumption stops and greed starts, probably because each and every one of them would be on the wrong side of the line. Revolutions come about because the instigators promise a better life for the downtrodden. Prince Charles and his fellows call for everyone to rise up and have less and when the supportive cheering stops, we discover that capitalism goes on as usual. Apparently we like it.

Charle’s parent are both long lived, so it is likely that he will also live long enough to see and experience the expected cooling during solar cycle 25, should it materialize. That should bring about a marked change in his rhetoric.
Hopefully we won’t get an El Nino big enough to cause an upswing in global temperatures to get the co2 proselytisers all excited and foaming at the mouth before then.

Well being inept enough to call Putin “Hitler” in a public place should have done for his succession in any event.
Firstly Putin’s actions were more like Stalin, Secondly the Ukraine issue is a result of the EU trying to wrench it out of the Russian orbit into its own. War carried on by other means as it would have been recognised in earlier days. Thirdly how difficult is it to keep your dumb-ass mouth shut till you get home.
Unpicking our constitution to build a Republic would be a balls-achingly difficult task, one not likely in the end to leave us either better-off of more free. Simplest that, as he reaches normal retirement age this year that he stands down from the succession.

One should always be careful about what one wishes for. The people always seem to want to be ruled and by a “king”, ref. 1 Samual 8. The Colonies even considered George Washington as a likely candidate for King. Perhaps it’s better to have a mindless neo-faux intellect that intones amazingly stupid things than have what Western Democracies are busily installing the Bureuacratic Emperors along with their Dear Leaders.
Perhaps this is the fatal flaw of democracy resulting in harkening to the siren call of “Kings” (socialism). It then always leads to totalitarianism followed by failure then chaos. Today, the nations plodding down this path never fully recover their former freedoms, energy or stature.
Better, then, the King-To-Be as a fool who, at best, knows which fork is the salad fork.

I seem to remember Prince Philip slamming this Climate cr*p some years back. Half a chance I thought. Won’t be of course because they are all powerless. Influence yes, because its the money and always follow the money.

Almost certainly the camel knows more about climate science than Prince Charles.
It’s outrageous that influential people like Prince Charles and President Obama can state that climate change is accelerating and apparently get away with it.
There has been no global warming in this century. How can something that hasn’t existed for almost two decades be accelerating?
There has recently been a debate in the UK as to whether Prince Charles should be free to speak his mind on political matters. Perhaps there should also be a debate about speaking the truth.
Once again, many thanks to Christopher Monckton for speaking the truth.
The day this idiot (Charles) becomes king will be the day I become a Republican (in the UK a Republican is one who wishes to abolish the monarchy).
Chris

The Prince of Wales has likely been led to this point by the circle of advisers and insiders surrounding him closely. I find it questionable that someone who utilizes as part of their public persona some vestige of the trappings that makes the notion of “Prince” real would write in so histrionically and inflammatory manner about his Prince. This is an essay to persuade, allegedly. But who is it going to persuade?

Agree. Not only Prince Charles, but any Neo-Malthusian Monarch dreaming about reincarnation as a deadly virus etc has shifted from comedy to tragedy. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Prince_Philip,_Duke_of_Edinburgh. Same applies to the Spiritual and Temporal House of Lords. No point to sink these archaic structures. Time is better spent defending fundamental rights.

Brava Christopher! Hopefully the American legislature can eventually moderate the insanity which is Obama (he’s bammy alright).
All of us should take heed your words and be vigilant against the supranational bureaucracies whose defining characteristic is that not one of them is answerable either via the ballot-box to any electorate or via the courts to any jurisdiction.

Luckily, barmy Prince Charles’ dream of global domination by his alien overlords will run into some serious roadblocks.
In Canada we have a sane leader, who has already taken steps to defuse the panic and hysteria. In the US, although a barely sane demagogue (although he and his followers think he is a demi-god) is in power, he won’t be for long. And, although US Patriotism may have been belittled and hidden for a few years, it would will emerge rapidly and powerfully if the UN is foolish enough to attempt to actually take the reins. Remember which side it is that has the guns, and which side tends to sign up for military service.
There are other countries where climate sanity is in charge. Putin’s cynical control is clearly bereft of genuine climate alarmism.
All it would take to wake the world from its self-allowed blinding faith in climate panic is a taste of the proposed cure. Right now it’s just talk… but attempt to put it into practice and that game would be over pretty quickly. In fact, I urge the alarmists to try. Seriously. It would be the best thing to happen to the complacent fools since the 1940s.

DennisA says:
May 31, 2014 at 1:39 am
It is noteworthy that also climbing onto this latest bandwagon, was Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, together with former Goldman Sachs man Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England. As governor of the Bank of Canada, he was instrumental in awarding George Soros the Canadian International Council Globalist of the Year Award in 2010.
Soros and Lagarde were both on Ban Ki Moon’s High Level Climate Finance Panel set up after Copenhagen, by UNFCC’s Christiana Figueres to garner $100 billion a year by 2020 for “Sustainable Development in Developing Nations”, as was carbon trading advisor Lord Stern. Figueres worked as a senior advisor to Stern’s IdeaCarbon group prior to joining the UN and she has been “trained by Al Gore” to deliver “An Inconvenient Truth”. ….etc
ms Legrde is being asked some question re embezzlement I gather..
at the same time shes free to go to the Bilderberg get together,
if totalitarian controls an issue and it is..
look out for the Bilderberg cluster very dangerous people..
msm is sorta finally running the odd item on them
Alt media is way ahead as usual.

But it is clear he is intending to defend some faiths more than others. This is the man who got married uttering marriage vows he had precisely zero intention of honouring. That’s one of the heavy burdens of being a King in England.

Brian Johnson UK says:
May 30, 2014 at 11:47 pm
“Dim as a Toc H lamp” – Google the phrase – and Prince Charles the Dim is one of its leading lights I gather……..
I was in my young youth the last time I heard that phrase. My headmaster was a prominent member.

I am grateful to those who have suggested I should travel about by motor-cycle. That was for 40 years my sole method of transport. I had a variety of v-twin sport-bikes (my favorites were the Ducati 996S and the Aprilia RSVR-1000). I used to travel 40,000 miles a year on two wheels, all over Europe from Scotland to Barcelona. Then a long-standing illness worsened and both my adrenal glands had to be thrown away. A strange side-effect is that my reaction-time is now so slow that at the moment I cannot ride or drive at all.
I never rode a Brough Superior (the fine machine on which my predecessor Of Arabia died). But I did ride an Egli Vincent, which handled surprisingly well, and would have bought it if my lovely wife had permitted it. But I had four v-twins already, so she said No and muttered about fur coats and diamonds instead. Strange sense of priorities, that.
To those who suggest that an aristocrat ought not to tell his cousin the Prince what he should and should not say, I respond that in some respects, notwithstanding the worst endeavors of the European tyranny-by-clerk, Britain remains a free country, where a cat may not only look at a king but hiss at him. And I call out the Prince not because he is a Prince but because, unlike his future subjects, he is debarred by his constitutional position from uttering on political questions but has chosen to ignore that convention. His misconduct – for that is what it is – does place the future of the monarchy at real risk. And I, for one, should not like to see it go. The Queen has served her subjects outstandingly, and Prince William bids fair to do the same. As for Chazza, I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again: if he wants to play politics he must not do it from anywhere in line to the Throne. If he renounces his right to the succession, he can maunder on all he likes about climate change and homeopathy and talking to plants and other loopy fields of Dark-Ages pseudo-science. But if he wants to inherit one day from his mum, mum’s the word.

You’d think I was bat**** crazy if I wrote a movie script suggesting mung-bean eating green spiritualists had hatched a plan to run the world by turning the environmental debate into a Trojan horse for their ambitions, and turning supporters into ‘believers’.
When I wrote Air Con I devoted the last half of the book to the agenda…but over the past five years, like Monckton, I’ve come to realise it is virtually ALL about the agenda and the scientific debate has become secondary. This is a clash of belief systems, and the mung-beaners have had a century’s head start.
Totalitaria is where they want to take us…enjoy:

The prince ought to worry more about covering his daughter-in-law’s backside than saving the planet. But seriously, he is no different than Obama, Merkel, or 90% of the world’s “leaders”. They attain power by one simple formula – invoke fear among the masses, then propose that only they have the solution.

.
Prince Charles is indeed an out-of-touch Greenie fool, who needs to spend there years working in a coal mine to get back in touch with reality.
However, there is a sub-plot to the Lord’s ramblings that should be made clear. Prince Charles is the heir to the Princes of Orange, who ruled England and northern Europe in the 17th century. And it was the Princes of Orange who destroyed the Lord’s beloved Catholic Church (and defeated some of our Catholic kings).
The Catholic Church has been plotting the downfall of the northern European monarchs ever since.
R

Oh the irony! Here is the UK Pledge of Allegiance, which Monckton as a member of the House of Lords, has sworn to uphold:
“I, [name], swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her Heirs and Successors
according to law.”
and here is the UKIP policy on the monarchy:
“The UK Independence Party, as its chieftain explains, is a firm supporter of Constitutional Monarchy”
although
“According to Farage, the party, in particular, believes that The Crown should scrupulously avoid at all times giving or appearing to give overt support to partisan and controversial political policies. ”
Meanwhile Monckton is again speaking out of both sides of his mouth. The reference “Who will rid us of this of this totalitarian prince?” is a clear harking to “”Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” said to be the words of King Henry II which were taken to mean that he wished the Archibishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, to be assassinated (which is what happened).
Is Monckton beseeching someone to prevent Charles from acceding to the throne by fair means or foul? Inquiring minds would like to know.
It really takes the biscuit for Monckton to be complaining about the lack of democratic accountability of the British Monarchy that he has sworn to uphold.REPLY: John, your comment is forcing an offtopic discussion, and I ask that you dial your own rhetoric back a bit.
Consider this. Suppose you are a member of a club, that has a set of bylaws, and this club gets a leader that decides to start taking the club 180 degrees from where you thought it was when you joined. Are you obligated to blindly follow his leader, or are you allowed to dissent? In the United States, children were taught to say the “Pledge of Allegiance” in schools, yet those same children have the right of dissent under free speech. Some of those same children who recited the pledge of allegiance are today speaking out against the current resident of the White House, the incompetence of the Congress, and the bureaucracy. Does that make them speak out of both sides of their mouth? I think not. You can love your country and its people but hate the Monarchy and/or your elected leaders. History is rife with such examples.
-Anthony

I refer “John A” to my answer at 5.32 am supra. And, in response to Ralf Ellis, as a Catholic and a Scot I sometimes wonder how much merrier England might have been if Bonnie Prince Charlie had not dithered at Derby. But UKIP’s policy is also my policy: God Save Her Majesty and her heirs and successors, provided that they keep themselves above politics and do not endanger their position by – for instance – describing those of us who have legitimate scientific doubts about the magnitude of Man’s influence on climate as “headless chickens”.

It is very sad that this well meaning man is so stupid. I find his stupidity irritating, but most people simply switch off when they don’t agree with him.
I think your article is interesting in it analysis of the new politics. The centre ground seems to have been taken over by a sort of paternalistic totalitarian sentiment. The prince in many ways is a victim/spokesperson of this new political elite who talk of consensus but are extremely doctrinaire and blinkered in their outlook.
I used to support the fringe parties, left and right, because they seemed to rebel with passion to change the world and respond to peoples needs, but recently have found that I find these fringe elements even more frightening than the paternalistic totalitarian centre. UKIP being an example of a new rabble mentality that is fuelled by anger and resentment that is becoming very aggressive and blinkered (try arguing against them about anything and they will be spitting and foaming within minutes, they are anti windmill and EU, but I do not want to share my time in their company)
Politics in the modern world is very depressing – what happened to the age of enlightenment?

“According to Farage, the party, in particular, believes that The Crown should scrupulously avoid at all times giving or appearing to give overt support to partisan and controversial political policies. ”
It really takes the biscuit for Monckton to be complaining about the lack of democratic accountability of the British Monarchy that he has sworn to uphold.

Odd those two quotes from your own pen above. See, one of them actually points out that Charles IS not only “poking his nose into partisan politics, but is lying and using falsified “science” to do that! The second? Can you not read sarchasm? Or is that a whole too large for a liberal/socialist/democrat/warmist to span?
By the way, those energy policies that you and Charles so fervently favor? That were directly responsible for the early deaths last winter of 24,000 citizens of the land Charles was to protect. And YOU are accountable for those murders as well. But YOU defend those policies.Now, how do YOU justify THEIR deaths? How does this “future king” face his people and say, “Yes, I killed 24,000 last winter; and want to kill more of you this coming winter.” Should we arrest YOU for murder? (Now, am I being sarcastic, or do I want you in prison for murder?)

Monckton of Brenchley,
Thank you for your informative and well reasoned response above ( Monckton of Brenchley
May 31, 2014 at 5:32 am).
I stand persuaded.
Clearly if the Prince of Wales is choosing to play in the game, then he gets to be treated as a player.
And the homeopathic and plant whispering facets are very illuminating, in a darkly creepy sort of way.
Respectfully yours,
etc.

“RACookPE1978 says:
May 31, 2014 at 6:41 am”
John A is unlikely able to influence Govn’t energy policy with a stupid comment beyond voting. Prince Charles can, and has, over the years he’s been talking to plants! Charlie and Chris do not live in the real world!

God Save Her Majesty and her heirs and successors, provided that they keep themselves above politics and do not endanger their position
===========
in a democracy, the people have the right to remove politicians. when the royal family engage in issues that are seen as a political debate, they become part of the democratic process and the people have the right to remove them.
fair and square. if the royal family engage in politics the people have the right to remove them. it is the founding principle of a democracy.
the problem for Charles is that he is too dim to understand this. He lives a live of luxury, while at the same time proposing that the rest of us live a life that he himself would never live.
Royal Hypocrite. Give up your houses and properties and get a job. Go live on the same pension as the rest of Britain. Then tell us how we should live. Your lifestyle is not sustainable.

Prince C. certainly has a green thumb and occasionally talks to his plants and vegetables, so it is said. He shoud better talk to his greens or, better still, put his thumb in his mouth and be quiet outright.

“Patrick” kindly congratulates me for not calling “John A” a troll. Of course I did not call it a troll, because its comment, though I disagreed with it, was on topic and was not a misrepresentation of what I had said, and was almost civil. In one respect it was inaccurate, though: I did not take the Oath of Allegiance in the House of Lords because by the time I inherited the title from my late beloved father the right of hereditary members of the House to sit and vote had been taken away. I had, however, taken the Oath many years previously on being sworn in as the youngest Deputy Lieutenant of Greater London.

Monckton of Brenchley
May 31, 2014 at 6:38 am
“… God Save Her Majesty and her heirs and successors, provided that they keep themselves above politics and do not endanger their position by – for instance – describing those of us who have legitimate scientific doubts about the magnitude of Man’s influence on climate as “headless chickens”.”
___________________
Intense singing of le „Ҫa ira“ instead of “God help save the Queen” might make him think about what might happen…
But they weren’t chickens then.

Monkton says
“The increasing brazenness and frequency of the lies being told about the climate, from Prince Charles’ more than usually ridiculous speech to the daftly hysterical climate assessments recently issued by Mr Obama and by Britain’s oldest taxpayer-funded pressure-group, the Royal Society, shows how desperate the totalitarians are to persuade the world to let them establish for the first time a global regime of absolute power wielded by supranational institutions entirely beyond the reach of any electorate.”
This is really the goal of the Obama administration. Obama himself is really little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy for the policies of his science Czar John Holdren
Here is a piece from the Examiner blog in 2009
July 16, 2009
John P. Holdren has been named President Barack Obama’s ‘Science Czar.”
Holdren’s official titles are: Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Assistant to the President for Science and Technology; and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The longtime Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Holdren is no stranger to controversy.
Holdren’s radicalism dates back to the late 1960s. In 1969 Holdren wrote that it was imperative “to convince society and its leaders that there is no alternative but the cessation of our irresponsible, all-demanding, and all-consuming population growth.”
That same year, he and (the now largely discredited) professor of population studies Paul Ehrlich jointly predicted: “If … population control measures are not initiated immediately and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.” In 1971 Holdren and Ehrlich warned that “some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century.”
Viewing capitalism as an economic system that is inherently harmful to the natural environment, Holdren and Ehrlich in 1973 called for “a massive campaign … to de-develop the United States” and other Western nations in order to conserve energy and facilitate growth in underdeveloped countries.
“De-development,” they said, “means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” “By de-development,” they elaborated, “we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.” ”
In the same year I posted the following on my sitehttp://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
“OBAMA’S ROADMAP TO THE CORPORATE SOCIALIST STATE
The Boxer – Kerry and Waxman – Markey bills represent the greatest threat that America’s constitutional democracy has ever faced.
The almost non -existent Anthropogenic (CO2 caused) Global Warming has been used as a pretext to try to grab control of all economic activity in the country because congress will decide the price of all energy via the distribution of carbon credits to whomever contributes most to their campaign funds. Energy production will be diverted to so called “green ” sources which are hopelessly uneconomic unless heavily subsidized.
If these bills pass, all private real estate will essentially cease to exist because Obama’s climate police will decide the appraisal value of all real estate and thus control the sales price of everyone’s home. Any alterations or improvements will have to be approved by government inspectors.
A vast bureaucracy will be created to run this virtual totalitarian police state run for the benefit of the congress and whichever corporations or special interests pay them the most.
Since my first post in January 2009 , solar activity has continued to be virtually non-existent making it more and more likely that the earth is entering a 20 – 30 year cool spell during which crop production would be seriously reduced at a time of increasing population. Obama’s policies of CO2 reduction would exacerbate this problem and worsen the worldwide food shortages which might well occur if the cooling actually develops.
The main stream media are aiding and abetting this coup-in some cases , e.g. NBC, because they are controlled by a company – General Electric which has spent millions on lobbying in order to benefit from the bill or because of the political (Socialist – world government ) agenda of its leaders e.g . BBC.
It is essential that the grass roots of working middle America become informed about this looming threat and come together to speak out and stop this takeover by a kleptocratic and self appointed elite who plan to be the rulers of this Corporate Socialist state .”
Fortunately because of the separation of powers in the US constitution these pernicious bills didn’t pass. However in an unconstitutional power grab the Holdren – Obama agenda is now being forced through by the executive branch via the EPA regulation of GHGs.
Obama realizes that the government doesn’t need to own all the means of production to create a Stalinesque economy. If you can regulate the price and type of energy and control the “energy efficiency ” of all economic activity as envisaged in Waxman Markey you have established a Marxist – Socialist- or with the eager cooperation of the campaign contributing industries a Corporate – Socialist state.

As a yank, I must admit I never got this constitutional monarchy thing. I also must admit I haven’t really tried. One thing I do get is that I personally will never recognize any claims from any royal of any nation of any form of sovereignty over me. This goes for elected officials of governments other than my own as well.

Late to the party – as always – I find that this thread has become altogether too serious.
So I’ll offer an old grammatical tweaser. Punctuate the following sentence:
Charles the Third walked and talked half a century after his brain was cut off.

My Lord
I have to say that if you go and read the Spectator and the Telegraph blog comments, you will find a remarkable concentration of fascist totalitarians expressing their views. They are unified by a hatred of anything other than absolutely free market capitalism under all situations, an absolute blame for their plight on the unemployed (who more often than not are blameless victims of useless manager/capitalists), an absolute belief that the only education system of any worth is the one that happened to work for them and an absolute belief that those who belief in cooperation rather than conflict are intrinsically evil (since socialism, communism, social democracy, call it what you will, has at its heart the concept that cooperation is equally as valuable as competing, that working together to achieve an aim is just as likely to succeed as trying to beat the whole world on your own).
I have absolutely no time for climate change zealots, but to argue a case fairly, you must be equally as scathing about the fascists whose far-right views are so close to Hitler in terms of intolerance (merely leaving out the camps and the gas chambers) as to be intrinsically evil.

Great essay, Lord Monckton. I think many do not understand the desire among many in academe and graduated from “top” universities, to participate in “true Marxism” – “oh it will be grand this time; we know how not to commit the mistakes of Russia and China, blah, blah.” These morons – incapable generally of doing real work – infiltrate every political, academic and governmental slot that is available – and then begin “white anting” the established order, eating it away from the inside out. Let’s give them a sound defeat, and eradicate the refuges that support them (for example, make government smaller, with a requirement to be effective or be cut, and get rid of the public sector unions, so that people can be fired as necessary, for starters).
Thanks for your good work. And the camel was a real looker.

“Big Don” has missed the point. It will not be elected overseas officials that he will be answering to willy-nilly: if the Treaty of Paris passes, it will be unelected bureaucrats in the new, all-powerful, irremovable, unaccountable institutions of global environmental and political governance that his own elected officials will be compelled by treaty, again willy-nilly, to obey. Get with the picture.

Mr Jagger seems to think that Hitler was Right-wing. His party, however, was the Socialist Workers’ Party. And he mistakes the amiable chaos of the market-place for a lack of co-operation, when in practice the market-place is the most efficient and inexpensive method of facilitating the co-operative allocation of resources by the beneficial influence of competition and of bargaining between those who have something to sell and those who want to buy something. All forms of socialist totalitarianism preach co-operation but in practice impose a single system from above and then misrepresent enforced compliance as willing co-operation: cf. Soetero”care”.

“Big Don” has missed the point. It will not be elected overseas officials that he will be answering to willy-nilly: if the Treaty of Paris passes, it will be unelected bureaucrats in the new, all-powerful, irremovable, unaccountable institutions of global environmental and political governance that his own elected officials will be compelled by treaty, again willy-nilly, to obey. Get with the picture.

And, thereby BECAUSE he (Charles) has served his purpose and HAS obeyed his masters in Brussels and China and the US (democratic administrations and bureaucrats), and BECAUSE Charles HAS BEEN a “good and faithful” servant of the bureaucracy who he admires, he (Charles) WILL BE kept in the very lap dogs of luxury to which he wishes to become permanent by those Brussels-sprout-bureaucrats who he empowers with his words.

Monckton of Brenchley says: May 31, 2014 at 8:02 am
All forms of socialist totalitarianism preach co-operation but in practice impose a single system from above and then misrepresent enforced compliance as willing co-operation: cf. Soetero”care”.
__________________________
Quite true, Mr Monckton. But do remember that your Jesus was a Communist, as is made oerfectly plain in Acts 4:32-35. There was no personal possessions, and all property was surrendered to the common purse. So why do you preach against the head of your creed? Do you place yourself above and beyond that esteemed leader?
R

I would love to be able to place my faith in Monckton or anyone who speaks sense like he does, They’re all players though in this horrible pantomime. We are headed in an irreversible course with disaster and there is no one at the helm. Only people shouting.

Another great post from Lord M.
Every time Charlie pronounces on a subject he looks like an idiot. Either he says something blindingly obvious (Putin = Hitler) or a piece of climate bandwaggonry or some such idiocy.
Everyone knows this and treats HRH’s pronouncements accordingly. So (imo) any campaign Charlie supports is tainted by his views. Why worry?
btw, if (as someone suggested above) Her Majesty were to outlive Charles, Prince Andrew would become the heir apparent, and if he became Andy I the new heir would be Princess Beatrice. All that grooming of Prince Willy would come to nothing.

One thing to remember is that the UK Monarchy is not totally free do do as they wish.
They have “minders” who’s job it is to guide them through the minefield which is domestic and international politics.
The Queen has a reputation for doing her own research, and being as aware as her minders, and in some cases even better informed. For what will soon be the longest reigning monarch in English history, she has made remarkably few errors. Imagine if your life were lived under the public microscope, how would you have fared?
But my point is that it is odd that Charles as he (in theory at least) gets closer to becoming King, is making more and more outrageous statements. The conspiracy theorist within me makes me wonder if this is not being manipulated.
The Queen can nominate her successor (with agreement by the government), and there is (as I dimly remember my history) precedent for skipping the eldest lineal descendent. That, of course, has been shaken up already by changing the rules to allow females to claim the role.
I think there are very few people that don’t consider William a much better candidate, including the Queen.
My own suspicions are that once she has passed the magic date making her the longest reigning English monarch ever, she will consider retirement and having at least a few years of her own. That would also allow her to nominate her successor rather than leaving it to the eldest descendent, and the possibility of the monarchy coming to an abrupt end shortly after that.
The Queen, whatever anyone may perceive her faults to be, cannot be considered unintelligent, and unable to make uncomfortable decisions.

PS: Lord M: Do you think that YOU could prevail on Anthony to do something for we Tablet users? Finger-scrolling though 160 comments to get to the point where I can leave a comment is a pain – as is the scroll back to the top (OK, I know I could just refresh for that, but not everyone does. Thanks.

Lord Monckton says that the UK is still a free country. From ‘Samizdata’:

Imagine telling somebody twenty years ago that by 2007, it would be illegal to smoke in a pub or bus shelter, or your own vehicle, or that there would be £80 fines for dropping cigarette butts, or that the words “tequila slammer” would be illegal, or the government would mandate what angle a drinker’s head in an advertisement may be tipped at, or that it would be illegal to criticise religions, or homosexuality, or rewire your own house, or that having sex after a few drinks would be classed as rape, or that the State would be confiscating children for being overweight. Imagine telling them the government would be contemplating ration cards for fuel and even foods, that every citizen would be required to carry an ID card filled with private information which could be withdrawn at the state’s whim. They’d have thought you a paranoid loon.

Seems that the UK is about 25% free. And they’re working on that last part.

Because Charles was born with a diamond studded, 24 carat gold spoon in his mouth, he feels the need to justify his highly privileged position. There must be mountains of guilt inside him but it’s not his fault. He should simply enjoy the fruits of his ancestors killings and domination and stop whining. Capitalism has delivered the conveniences to his doorstep. Nice fossil fueled carS, climate control, AIR travel, GAS central heating, and so on.

Harry Passfield wins the prize for the neatest and funniest comment.
Philip Peake thoughtfully suggests that perhaps Her Majesty, once she has outlasted her namesake on the Throne, might retire and nominate her successor. However, I suspect that the Act of Succession would have to be repealed first.
There is actually some danger that, if Prince Charles carries on as he does, Parliament will lose patience with him and will change or suspend the Act to allow the succession to skip a generation on this occasion. Prince William, a well-planted and much-admired worker for various charitable causes (as, to be fair, is Prince Charles) would then inherit, and would be wildly popular. For one thing, he is as discreet as his father is garrulous.
Ministers are already exasperated by the endless long and agonized letters written to them by Prince Charles telling them how to do their jobs, always well-meaningly but often on the basis of irritatingly incomplete information or understanding. His virtue is that he is one who cares: his vice is that he lets his heart rule his head even on those occasions when it would be better the other way about.
More seriously, some Ministers – no names, no pack-drill – are as unconvinced as I am that the monarchy, which they admire at least as much as I do and which they fervently wish to maintain, might not survive Prince Charles as King. The Queen has been influential precisely by appearing to be uninfluential, while giving sound and well-measured advice to her Prime Ministers during their weekly audiences (which Margaret Thatcher hated, habitually referring to Her Majesty as “that woman”).
There is a real and now widespread concern among the classe politique in Britain that allowing the Prince to succeed to the Throne could, as I suggested in the opening sentence of the head posting, bring the thousand-year monarchy to an untimely end.
There is a small and – thanks to the Queen’s exemplary devotion to her duties and to her subjects – rapidly dwindling movement (on the Left, inevitably, where every bad idea finds a natural home) to do away with the monarchy lock, stock and scepter. The danger seen by some Ministers is that Prince Charles as King might one day to decide to adopt a cause not supported by the hard Left, which might then turn on him and scrap the monarchy as it earlier petulantly scrapped the admittedly anachronistic right of hereditary members of the House to sit and vote.
At present, my estimate is that there is a 50:50 chance that ministers at some stage between now and the Prince’s accession to the Throne will change the law to prevent that potentially disastrous outcome. The Prince is now on notice that if he does not fall utterly and immediately silent on all matters of partisan politics he will be unceremoniously cut out of the Royal succession to prevent any further damage to the wholehearted consent. on all but the hard-Left fringe of the House, upon which the continued survival of the monarchy rests.
To me, what is fascinating about the Prince’s reckless and persisting abandonment of the constitutional principle of holy silence on all matters of politics is that the subject on which he is prepared to forfeit the Throne is – of all things – climate change. One would think that he would have taken a great deal of care to choose his casus belli more carefully. It may be that his spin-meisters will see the head posting, and perhaps they may even read down this far to see what is being said about it. If so, they may care to get a copy of the RSS satellite data for the past 26 years (very nearly all the satellite record), and ask the statistician of their choice to determine whether that record shows any statistically significant global warming. If the answer is No, would one of them pluck up the courage to tell the Prince before it is altogether too late?
The Prince, unlike Margaret Thatcher, does not like to be gainsaid or argued with, so he will resent and punish anyone who tells him some home truths about his frankly naive belief in the New Superstition. But whoever plucks up the guts to ensure that he is for the first time briefed on both sides of the argument rather than the side he wants to hear may have done more than make him better informed: he or she may have saved the monarchy.

Prince Charles, soon to be King Charles, labours under a very challenging handicap. He is stupid. And having being reared within the hothouse of British Royalty he simply has no understanding of how the world actually works.
Prince Charles (a.k.a. The Royal Wingnut because of his large ears and cranky beliefs) is a danger to society because he knows not that he knows not.

Thanks Paul, I wasn’t aware that aside from his 4 homes in England, Scotland and Wales he has one in Romania. In fact I just found out it’s more than one. Yet the video I posted above Charles in a comment about global warming says:

Prince Charles“We are making it cool to use less stuff”

The lesson is clear. What Prince Charles means is less stuff for YOU, and more stuff for HIM. And this man attacks capitalism. Sheesh!!
It’s cool to have lots, then tell others it’s really cool to have NOTHING. LOL. ROFLMAO.http://duchyofcornwall.org/site-map.html
Poundbury
Dartmoor & Princetown
Hereford
Isles of Scilly
Truro
Newquay
Highgrove
Home Farm
London
Ancient Monuments
Water & Woodlands
Holiday Cottages
Duchy of Cornwall Nursery
Duchy of Cornwall propertieshttp://www.duchyofcornwallholidaycottages.co.uk/browse-properties/

I’m a climate realist and I voted UKIP, but I am also a royalist.
Calling the Prince of Wales a totalitarian is hysterical nonsense which would make a climate alarmist blush, In reality he is a very well meaning but not very bright man who is vulnerable to being misled by the fashionable ideas of the day, like most people. As for his lifestyle and the business activities of the Duchy of Cornwall (over which he is far from exercising complete control) they are more in the tradition of ruralist romantic Toryism (the most conservative strand of British poltiics) than anything else, as are his attempts to support traditional architecture. His lifestyle may be lavish by most standards, but given his position in life it is restrained, and you can’t judge anyone fairly without taking their personal cirxumstances into account.
Unfortunately most Americans, and many other people too, lack the background and contextual knowledge to understand where a prince is coming from.

I agree with much of what Mr Arlington said, but the Prince’s remarks were indeed totalitarian in their thrust but, as I carefully pointed out in the head posting, it was not clear whether he knew he had in effect become an advocate for enviro-totalitarianism.
I have recently been studying the rise of the totalitarians in Russia, China, and Germany. Particularly in the last, it was not only the failure of the vast majority to speak out against what was happening that allowed the dictatorship to become established almost unopposed, but the extraordinary number of statements by well-meaning people to the effect that the few who did speak out against the emerging tyranny were unduly alarmist, or even mad.
I have read the draft treaty of Copenhagen and the further attempt at introducing enviro-totalitarianism that was tried at Durban. I do not know what happened at Doha because the drafts were not made publicly available at the time (or since, as far as I know). But it is all too clear that the next major attempt at bullying or badgering the nations of the world to sign up to a global tyranny will be in Paris (though there are also some indications an attempt this December to bring the thing forward by a year in the hope of catching us all off our guard, a technique the tyrannical class in Germany often used).
Mr Arlington should not underestimate the determination of those behind this scam to continue profiting by it regardless of the fact that there is no scientific and still less economic basis for taking any action at all. Prince Charles’ interventions, whether or not he is conscious of the malevolent ambitions of those who draft them for him, are calculated to favor the establishment of just such a tyranny as is described in detail in the Copenhagen and Durban documents.
A Melbourne radio station, thinking – as Mr Arlington does – that I had overstated the case at Copenhagen, obtained a copy of the draft treaty and consulted Queen’s Counsel specializing in constitutional law. The barrister, on reading the draft, was horrified and commended me for having brought it to the public attention, though he criticized me for having understated the extent to which the treaty, if it had passed, would have brought democracy, accountability, liberty and prosperity to an end worldwide.
My I suggest that Mr Arlington reads the Copenhagen and Durban drafts, looks at my commentaries on both, reads the Prince’s speeches on the subject, and then decides whether I have gone too far in my remarks? On balance, my instinct – right or wrong – is not to repeat the mistakes of those who by their silence allowed the three great totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century to become established all but unopposed.

Monckton of Brenchley says:
May 31, 2014 at 9:39 am
…”More seriously, some Ministers – no names, no pack-drill – are as unconvinced as I am that the monarchy, which they admire at least as much as I do and which they fervently wish to maintain, might not survive Prince Charles as King.”
——————————————
Christopher, my guess is soon after he takes the throne those wishing to have their god allah be the only ruler would torch the country side and all royal property, kill whatever infidels and demand he step down and end the monarch, forever.
Naturally he would do just that, capitulate before the battle began. More’s the pity
imho “Long live the queen”
cn

Just as well this website is about science. The history on it is sadly misinformed.
For the attention of Lord Monckton, the last King of England (William III) died in 1702. The last Queen of England (Anne) died in 1714. It is no more valid today to talk about a King of England than to talk about a King of Mercia, or a King of Northumbria or a King of Dalriada.
William Abbot says,
‘the fanaticism of James II’
William, you’ve fallen for the propaganda put out by the historians who supported the usurpation of the monarchy by William of Orange. The reality is that King James II of England (and VII of Scotland) was somebody who believed in religious tolerance. However, the Anglicans could not abide with the idea of tolerating either Catholics or Nonconformists and so opposed his plans. The so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 set back the cause of religious toleration by over a hundred years. It wasn’t until 1870 that Catholics could attend universities in the UK and there is still a ban on Catholics becoming the monarch of the UK.
Ralfellis says,
‘Prince Charles is the heir to the Princes of Orange, who ruled England and northern Europe in the 17th century. And it was the Princes of Orange who destroyed the Lord’s beloved Catholic Church (and defeated some of our Catholic kings).
The Catholic Church has been plotting the downfall of the northern European monarchs ever since.’
I don’t know where ralfellis gets his idea that the Princes of Orange destroyed the Catholic Church. Where is this supposed to have taken place? The somewhat unfamiliar reality is that the Pope of the time actually supported William of Orange’s takeover of the English and Scottish monarchy. As to evidence that ‘the Catholic Church has been plotting the downfall of the northern European monarchs ever since,’ I suspect that that is largely in ralfellis’s mind.

Mr Nolan is much less kind to the Muslims than is fair or charitable. Those of us who have studied the remarkable Muslim contributions to science from the golden age of Islamic scholarship, and also the brief flowering of relations that became almost harmonious between Muslims and Christians in southern Spain (begun by a Muslim conquest and ended by a Christian reconquest) would not choose hastily to dismiss Islam. The vast majority of the Islamic citizens of Britain are law-abiding, and many of them adhere to moral standards that an old-fashioned Christian like me cannot but admire.
There are a few fiery preachers, but our security services now monitor the mosques and also try to keep tabs on a small minority of schools that try to radicalize their pupils. It is, of course, startling that, though no Muslim country has the right to send its citizens to live permanently in Britain, the Muslim population has risen from 1 million in Margaret Thatcher’s time to more than 3 million today.
One might query whether so rapid a rate of net immigration is likely to lead to proper and harmonious assimilation of our new fellow-citizens. But there is always the possibility that our exceptionally tolerant nation will, as it has in the past, succeed in causing more of an alteration to the attitudes of the sons of Islam who come to our shores than they do to our way of life. We should certainly not make loose accusations that they will be likely to cause violence and murder on a large scale. I do hope the moderators will be kind enough to keep out that kind of hate speech from these threads if they possibly can.

Perhaps once cooling becomes clearly established during solar cycle 25 he may do the decent thing and abdicate without ever having taken the throne and pass the sceptre to William, once the Queen either retires or dies in the job. I think it will be the latter, and as men by and large do not live as long as woman, then Charles may not survive his mother and so the crown will pass straight to William.

@ Lord Monckton. I fear I must take issue with you on the point you raise about the Islamic immigrants. Thus far the most integrated have been the first generation immigrants, the more radicalised have been the second generation immigrants born in the UK, as a study showed after the London bus bombings.
How to better integrate a foreign religion that also thinks it should have political control of any and all countries (Islam) is a problem yet to find a solution. In the end, it may not be possible, since the Islamic population of the UK will become the majority population within 40 years (much of Europe too), the future may prove to be somewhat unsettled.
A foretaste of what is in store for much of Europe will be delivered from Russia who will be the first to sucombe to a majrity Muslim population in, with the Russian army being majority Muslim in a mere 8 years, the general population following 15 years later.
Perhaps Charles should take up a new religion…

tabnumlock said; Prince Chucky might feel different if he had to pay his own utility bills (with money he earned).

No, I doubt it. ‘One’ doesn’t give up ‘ones’ upbringing or belief so readily. Certainly not on his current income, perhaps on a wage of less than the average wage, and living in a typical poorly insulated house. But I still wouldn’t put money on it. One is British, after all. Difficult to understand, unless ‘British’.

I think that will be a very short victory for them.
Civil society and free enterprise to the extent we enjoy them are what civilization is made of. To the extent they destroy those civil society and free enterprise is the extent to which the rise of barbarism spreads. They may gain the world for a day but they will soon find themselves destroyed too.
You cannot destroy the foundation of civilization and expect to live in a civilized world after the destruction.

Funny guy is The Prince.[…] demand no less than an end to capitalism as we know it […]
So we will be re-distributing his family lands at some point soon? The family, in its loosest sense, took all its current land holdings by very sharp swords and lots of dead land holders. Capitalism. I have more soldiers than you therefore your land is now mine.[…] shows how desperate the totalitarians are to persuade the world to let them establish for the first time a global regime of absolute power wielded by supranational institutions entirely beyond the reach of any electorate.[…]
Our idiot Prince will be more than happy to hand over his many family holdings to the UN? Even better, without all that income from land and property, he will head out and get himself a real job. Just like most of his subjects.
He will never be King, not least because his determination to dump the family assets will probably make him the first Prince in modern history to have a red hot poker shoved up his rectum by one of his own sons. A common practice amongst England’s royal houses in times past. See ‘Game of Thrones’.

I think if a CAGW political revolution is nigh, it should be just like the French revolution. Behead all elitists and aristocrats, Then also, behead the first two waves of wanna-be elitist/aristocratic replacements.
After all, the wealthy have HUGE carbon footprints.
I wonder how Charles would like that.

So Christopher, if I may call you that; where did you get yourself the horse of a different color (the one on the right ).?
Izzat as difficult to ride, as it looks ?
But it does suit you, and is a bit more elegant than floating down on a parachute !
g
PS: agree with the nyet on Charles, but not quite ready yet to chase the Barbary Apes off the Rock.
There is something to be said for tradition.

Mr Martin rightly points to the arithmetical consequences for the West’s population of its immoral policy of baby-butchering, a policy that traditional Muslims abhor with no less vigor than traditional Christians. In Russia, which he mentions, the Muslims are already half the population. In France, the same will soon be the case, if it is not the case already. Britain will indeed not be far behind. But the answer is not to blame the Muslims, who adhere to the ancient principle, enshrined for instance in the Hippocratic Oath, that killing innocent little children in the womb of their mothers is intrinsically and outrageously wrong. We should blame our lawmakers, who took the side of evil. The West will pay the price for their fatal decision in the most direct way possible – by the inexorable extinction of its own population, an extinction that is already well under way.

“””””…..Harry Passfield says:
May 31, 2014 at 9:08 am
PS: Lord M: Do you think that YOU could prevail on Anthony to do something for we Tablet users? Finger-scrolling though 160 comments to get to the point where I can leave a comment is a pain – as is the scroll back to the top (OK, I know I could just refresh for that, but not everyone does. Thanks……”””””
Well Harry, if you choose a juvenile toy, over an ergonomically useful tool; then you deserve what you are stuck with.
Just imagine that you are bed ridden, and plumbed into the building, in order to breathe; and your brain no longer sends control signals to your tongue or throat, so you are now silent forever.
So how are you going to communicate with anybody; and do it in multiple languages since you are in a foreign speaking country, with your pad/ped/pid/pod/pud toys ??
And how would you draw a circuit schematic, or manipulate numbers, or graphs, with 12 different windows open, all at once, and do it through layers of grubby fingerprints.
You wanted it (I presume); soon we all will be stuck with it. At that point, I will just retire, and go fishing.

The problem with any form of Government is that there are people involved.
People have all the human failings we all experience.
In a democracy we elect the people who are given authority over us. We can elect different people latter but we are still to often stuck with what the previous elected people established. (Hence the rush to pass Obamacare and Peolosi’s you have to pass it to find out what’s in it.)
In a monarchy people are born with authority.

Here is a step by step process to end the madness. 1) cut off the royal family in the budget, 2) send property tax bills for the properties claimed by the family, and 3) turn all surrendered properties into museums for maintaining the tourist economy and traditions and keep the royal guards for looks and photo ops. Oh and hang the pictures of Charles in the mop rooms.

Alba says:
I don’t know where ralfellis gets his idea that the Princes of Orange destroyed the Catholic Church. Where is this supposed to have taken place?
________________________________
At the Battle of the Boyne, north of Dublin.
While it is rumoured that the Vatican may have assisted William of Orange, because the Church feared the designs and goals of Louis XIV more than William of Orange, it is also true that the Catholic Church never recovered from the establishment of the Reformation’s Age of Reason and the formation of the Royal Society. Never again would the Church be above criticism and beyond accountability, and never again would it be the font of all ‘scientific’ knowledge.
The situation then was similar to the ‘modern’ phenomena of kiddie abuse. You will note that the kiddie scandals have only erupted in the Protestant north. Does anyone think that the same events have not happened recently in the Catholic south?? This is the danger of an organisation that is above criticism, and can get away with anything.
And this was the religio-cultural battleground that the naive UKIP leadership suddenly had to deal with. They did not understand the religio-political realities of Scotland – the realities of Rangers vs Celtic – but they were rudely awoken at a very late date. We come back to the well-worn adage, that if you fail to understand history, then history is bound to repeat itself.
R

Monckton of Brenchley says: May 31, 2014 at 12:01 pm
Mr Nolan is much less kind to the Muslims than is fair or charitable. Those of us who have studied the remarkable Muslim contributions to science from the golden age of Islamic scholarship, and also the brief flowering of relations that became almost harmonious between Muslims and Christians in southern Spain.
____________________________
Sorry, Monckton, but you obviously know nothing about Islam.
You need to look up the Covenant of Dhimmitude, for no Christian was free from servitude in Muslim lands, including Spain. That is what Dhimmitude means – serfdom or slavery. Someone who has no political control over their life or their nation (and has to pay the jizya tax to maintain Muslim control). Islam was always run like Sparta in Greece, and the Christians were the subjugated Helots. This is what Islam means – ‘subjugation’. Look it up.
And the Lord needs to look more critically at these so-called Muslim ‘inventions’. In reality, Islam never invented a darn thing, it was all Egyptian and Roman inventions rediscovered. The “1001 Islamic Inventions” tour of Europe had carpets, distillation, the ogave arch, the camera obscura and crankshafts as examples of Muslim inventions. Anyone with any knowledge of Rome will know these inventions predated Islam by a long margin. Geeezz, this tour did not even know that ‘camera obscura’ is Latin.
And regards preserving Greek science, again this was not done by Islam. For many centuries, Islam only represented a small 15% controlling elite in the East. All the donkey work and all the universities were run by the Armenian and Syriac Christians and the Babylonian Jews (Iraq was predominantly Jewish until 1947, with Judaism’s greatest seminary or university being at Pumbeditha, now called Fallujah).
Because the Arabs could not speak Greek, all of the Greek texts were translated and preserved by Syriac Christians, not Muslims. Muslim education then was the same as it is now – woeful. Middle Eastern universities give prizes based upon who your father is, rather than what you know – as anyone who has worked there will know all too well. Just don’t fly behind a local pilot…. And exactly the same happened in the 1st millennium. Thus all educational establishments of the East were always run by Syriac Christians, as the history of the region admits.
And the Christian education system in the East ran until quite recently. Most cities in Turkey and Syria were majority Christian until the 1920s – until the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Greek genocide of 1927. Iraq was substantially Jewish until 1947.
I think the Lord needs to take off his rose-tinted propaganda glasses, and read a little real history. It is a truism that the pulpit does not broadcast real history.
Ralph

The royals’ role is to sell the brand of Britain and secondly the brand of their own family, nothing else. If they engaged in politics, eventually they would be on the wrong end of the vote, and then what would be the point of keeping them? Dianna,William and Catherine all have seemed to have the job down well but not Charles. They would be wise not to fail at the job of marketing.

Stand aside allow the muslims to follow their true selfs, codes of conduct , inter tribe relations, long used and honored practice of war on one another (once out of the womb) , and 100% following of the Koran thus after a time little we need to worry of the few who remain in rags living in mud huts to worry us at all. Let those live who live still at that time.

It is very difficult to debate with one who has done little reading and still less thinking. Try reading the record of Umar Khayyam’s astronomy, or his Rubaiyat, or the philosophy of science discussed by al-Haytham, regarded by many as of no less importance than Thales of Miletus in establishing the scientific method.
And it is the “ogival” arch (of or pertaining to the ogee), not the “ogave” arch. There was indeed a golden age of Islamic scholarship, and the Ahmadiyya Muslims are doing their best to revive it, though they are much persecuted by other Muslims.
Or one might consider the discovery and ingenious deployment in Muslim architectural decoration of the eight semiregular tessellations (representational art in the mosques being forbidden much as it was in the churches under the puritans in Cromwellian England).
To sneer at the Muslims for having contributed nothing but violence to civilization is to distort and disfigure the history of astronomy, of mathematics, of art, of architecture, of philosophy, of poetry. It is more valuable to recognize the good in the traditions of those of other faiths than it is
to sneer at them.
And the moral superiority of the majority of Muslims who do not endorse or practice baby-butchering over the horrifying denial of the Hippocratic Oath by profiteering doctors indulged by crazed politicians in the West is undeniable.
A little more even-handedness and a little less hate would be sensible. As the Book of Proverbs puts it, “A false balance is abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight.”

fobdangerclose says: May 31, 2014 at 4:41 pm
Short way to the same point as Ralph above. “What Winston Churchill said….”
____________________________
Indeed. The out-of-touch Lord needs to read ‘River War’ by Winston Churchill. I cannot repeat what Winston Churchill said of Islam here, as this is a family website. And I don’t want to be arrested by the UK’s 1984 thought-police.
However, another very valuable historical book is “The Syriac People”, by Yakup Tahincioglu, which details the dhimmitude (servitude) of Syriac Christians living under Islam.http://www.amazon.com/History-Culture-Beliefs-Living-Anatolia/dp/6055524732
The loud subtext of this wonderful book is: “we have worked for Islam as good and reliable dhimmis (serfs) for 1,000 years, so why do you still persecute us?” It is a plaintive cry that goes unanswered. It is a plaintive cry that the Lord cannot hear and cannot understand.
In 1860 Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey was 55% Christian. Now there are only 40 (forty) Christians left, out of a population of 900,000. Does the Lord care? The tourist guide says there are 12 churches in the old city, dating from the 3rd century AD (this is where Christianity was first founded). But 11 of these churches have been burned to the ground in recent years. Does the Lord care? I care, and I am an Atheist……
A good read on this latter topic is ‘Paradise Lost’ by Giles Milton.http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Lost-Giles-Milton-ebook/dp/B005LWQAYC
Ralph

Monckton of Brenchley says: May 31, 2014 at 5:02 pm
It is very difficult to debate with one who has done little reading and still less thinking. Try reading the record of Umar Khayyam’s astronomy, or his Rubaiyat.
____________________________
Typical that the main complaint is of my typo error – while working on an iPad in a crowded bar. But the point remains, that the non-semicircular arch was designed and constructed long before Islam was invented. Indeed the Deyrulzafaran monastery in Mesopotamia contains the flattest arch ever made, and that was constructed in the 3rd or 4th century AD.
And the good Lord seems to be unaware that Omar Khayyam was not a Muslim. Like most or all of the scientists of this region during the ‘Golden Era’ of Islam, Omar Khayyam was charged with apostasy (which in Islam receives a death sentence) and his books burned. Try reading the translation by Edward FitzGerald.
And perhaps one should also mention that the great Muslim philosopher Hunayn ibn Ishaq, who translated much of Greek philosophy and science into Aramaic and Arabic, who was of course a Syriac Christian. The list does go on and on.
.
Oh, and if the Lord does not like ‘baby butchering’, as he cruelly terms it, I am presuming that he will openly condemn Koran sura 18, “The Cave”. The parable of ‘Moses and the Green Man’ in sura 18 says that:
Quote:
“As for the boy (who Moses murdered in cold blood), his parents were believers and we feared lest he should make disobedience and ingratitude to come upon them. So we desired that their Lord might give them in his place, one better than him in purity and closer to having compassion.” K. 18:80
Yes, the moral of this wonderful parable is that if your child is disobedient, you should kill them, because god will give you a more obedient replacement child. This parable is the root cause of all the so-called ‘honour killings’ that now plague the West. So I do hope that in the spirit of ‘even-handedness’, as the Lord puts it, he will also condemn the Koran chapter 18.
The BBC and the UK media have so far refused to highlight the inverted morality of sura 18 of the Koran. But I am sure that the Lord’s presence and stature in the House of Lords will give him the necessary platform to condemn sura 18 in the Koran. Will he do this? For the sake of all the many hundreds of children who are slaughtered every year by their parents, because of this evil verse, will he stand up and condemn the Koran sura 18?
Ralph

Monckton of Brenchley says: May 31, 2014 at 5:02 pm
There was indeed a golden age of Islamic scholarship, and the Ahmadiyya Muslims are doing their best to revive it, though they are much persecuted by other Muslims.
____________________________
I think the good Lord misses the entire point here.
The Ahmadiyya are NOT Muslims. They are not even allowed call themselves Muslims in Pakistan, for instance. They are heretic apostates. They are kuffer unbelievers. They are slaughtered in the streets, and their temples are burned to the ground.
So the good Lord identifies two practitioners of progressive Islam – Omar Khayyam and the Ahmadiyya – and neither of them are Muslim !!! I think that polemic deserves a ‘D minus’.
However, if you dare to look at the problem rationally, this the whole problem with Islam. Freethinking is not allowed in Islam, because the Koran contains all knowledge and all human law, and so anyone who dares approach rational enlightenment is an instant heretic. Thus no good Muslim can ever be a scientist.
I rest my case.
Ralph

“Thus no good Muslim can ever be a scientist”
And no Jew or Christian can either:
“Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.” – 1 Cor 18:20-25
“14 Therefore once more I will astound these people
with wonder upon wonder;
the wisdom of the wise will perish,
the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.” – Isaiah 29:14

Karim D. Ghantous says:
May 31, 2014 at 6:53 pm Jews and Christians can take it upon themselves to believe or not parts of the Bible or Koran. A Muslim who does that is fair game to be killed. Now tell, savant, what has Islam contributed to the world in the last, say, 1000 years, scientifically? Nothing that affects us. The Jews and Christians, perhaps apostates, but revered by scientists and the public at large, have brought all our science and technology. However, Muslims do contribute. A few years ago I read (somewhere) that there were 100 conflicts going on in the world that might be called “wars.” It turns out that Muslims were involved in 99 of them. That’s really special.

Oh Lord… (sic!)
I know Watts has a weird obsession with Monckton, but that does not excuse that he can post all sorts of nonsense here.
Yes, the Brits have a monarchy. But NO, unlike what Monckton implies, they do NOT rule. You may not know this, but there are actually elections in this country. The Royals don’t rule. Got that?
Here is an actual problem, but which is not addressed by Monckton because of his personal agenda: there are 26 Bishops in Parliament, which are NOT elected! In a democracy!! In a country where their church represents a minority in the population, they send 26 uneclected bishops. Their only qualification is to believe that they have an invisible friend living in the sky, apparently.
Monckton is a politician (with shitloads of time on his hands to write blog entries at his mate’s climate blog) — but he does not care about 3% of the “representatives” not being elected; instead bickers on about good old Charly – who is also not elected, but then, he does not sit in the HOL.

First; Prince Charles has made himself an outspoken advocate of “doing something” about atmospheric CO2. That makes the prince and all his “doing somethings” of general interest on this blog. The prince flies by private jet to Romania. Its of interest. Obviously, so is his nutty lambast against capitalism. The facts about the UK’s constitutional monarchy is also timely and relevant. Accusing Watts of having a weird obsession with Monckton is slandering WUWT. So please take it back.
Second. Your comment about the Bishops sitting in the House of Lords is ill-conceived. The United States of America is a republic, not a democracy. The Senators represent the states, not the populations of the states. For most of our history they were elected by the state legislatures not by direct elections. The President is elected by Electors (still). States are free to choose the electors in any manner they see fit. The Supreme court is not elected. We could go on and on. What country doesn’t have some unelected rulers?
Finally, you say, “Royals don’t rule, got that” You are wrong. Prince Charles is never going to be an autocrat. But he is going to be the Head of State of several Kingdoms. What do you think a kingdom is? He has a very specific and important role to play in ruling those various kingdoms. He unsettles the constitutional order if he shares his political opinions precisely because the monarch does rule over the kingdom. Its all very complicated, historical and I think delicate. The prince doesn’t seem to appreciate how he upsets this balance when he takes sides on political issues. The guy needs more restraint because; royals do rule.
Matt, you need more education. Until then, exercise some restraint. Your ignorance is showing.

I think that this comment was intended to reveal the political stance POW was taking. The monarchy are the PR firm of the Commonwealth of Nations, as well as UK. And I feel that Prince Charles was unwise to make these comments of his known. Maybe he had a hidden agenda?
Anyway, it will blow over.

“Christians can take it upon themselves to believe or not parts of the Bible”
Unfortunately, many Christians believe that the Bible is the Word of God and that they can’t take it upon themselves to believe selected portions. Or that is what they say, anyhow.

Recall that my sole purpose in briefly mentioning Islam was to set right some unfortunate hate speech by a commenter. Mr Ellis, who wanders from the topic of the head posting, does himself no favors by relentlessly pointing out Islam’s defects and denying its valuable contributions to science, particularly during its golden age in the 9th to 12th centuiries.
Yes, the Tent-maker was Muslim: he may have studied under Ibn Sina (Latine Avicenna), and certainly translated one of his works, with a commentary. That he was not orthodox and used to bait the clergy is undeniable. The central theme of his drinking-song, for instance, exhibits throughout the Sufic insistence on the here-and-now and the doubt as to the hereafter.
Yet it is no fairer to say Khayyam was not a Muslim than it is to say that Galileo, for instance, was not a Catholic in that he was punished by the Church for having drawn startlingly inappropriate theological conclusions from the then long-established fact that the Earth orbits the Sun rather than vice versa.
Khayyam’s contributions to mathematics included an ingenious geometric approach to solving each of the 14 classes of cubic equations by reference to the intersections of two conic sections.
Nor is Mr Ellis right to sneer at the Ahmadiyyas because other Muslims persecute them. They take an approach that I commend to him: they do not preach hate, but might almost be Christian in their emphasis on a gentler, kindlier and specifically more scholarly religion than that of the fanatics who, as another commenter has justly pointed out, have caused most of the wars and terrorist acts of recent times.
The gentleness of the Ahmadiyyas, whose annual conference in England I attended as their guest some years ago, is winning them converts from hard-line, traditional Islam. They now represent one-sixth of the entire Ummah and should not be dismissed as non-Muslim any more than it would be appropriate for Catholics to dismiss Protestants as non-Christian on the ground that, applying the strict (though inspirationally-expressed) test in the Commonitorium of St. Vincent of Lerins, they do not in all respects hold and teach the faith that was held and taught by all or nearly all the saints, doctors, and fathers of the Church until the Theses of Luther, the Sermons of Knox, and the Institutes of Calvin.
And, like anyone who has read – for instance – Dalrymple’s harrowing “From the Holy Mountain” is well aware of the rapid extinction and suppression of Christianity in many parts of the Muslim world (and also in Israel) over the past century. I am fully conscious of these things, and unhappy about them. But one should not allow distress and outrage, however justifiable, to blind one to the ancient Muslim contributions to mathematics, to science, to philosophy, and to poetry. It is a meeting of minds that we must seek, for only with mutual respect comes the removal of the motive for persecution – unjustifiable contempt.
The most extraordinary circumstance in the history of religion – which theologians, with an economy of words that is uncharacteristic of them, call simply the “Christ Event” – points the way. In an unconsidered outpost of the Roman Empire a carpenter’s son was executed for making a nuisance of himself and even the chief of his followers found it expedient to deny him. Yet within 100 years, and without a shot fired (I speak metaphorically), a religion with no wealth, no influence, no armies had become the dominant philosophical force throughout the known world, and has to a startling extent remained so to this day. The Christ Event did not occur because the Christians hated those who persecuted them, but because they honored the precepts of the Old Covenant so strongly re-emphasized in the New: thou shalt love.
If there is one purpose in this blog, it is to argue as vigorously as may be against the descent of science into knuckle-dragging, medievalistic superstition. We do not serve that objective well if we sneeringly dismiss the past intellectual contributions to science of those some of whose descendants are not worthy of them. There is no more place for hatred here than there is for its handmaid, unreason. And let us now get back on topic.

Dangerous radicalism My Lord, of the sort which has led the rebel colonists to the south to republicanism and the coronation of Mr O, who might just as well be titled His Imperial Majesty. Cromwell shromwell! How did that go, then? Give me death or give me taxes…with or without representation!
His Royal Highness has simply been converted to Greengoremonism, a religious cult currently affecting many folk in this post Christian age, in a Chestertonian sort of way. Likely likewise most of his advisers and chums…..of the four main political party leaders in the UK, I suspect two are believers, one just a cynical opportunist and three mighty huzzahs for Nigel!
The cult will eventually melt into history as they all do…and not coz of global warmin’ innit. It’s in the dark heart of our political class and their media lackeys where true danger lies. HRH has done many good things. I’m sure King Charles will do many more when his great mother…I am almost tempted to say Our Great Mother, but will restrain myself…meets her maker. Answer his nonsense with the trusty sword of truth, then read a few pages of Peter Simple. replace the Lawrenconian garb with the ermine and get a grip man, before you inflict President Cameron and Vice President Clegg upon us!

“Here is an actual problem, but which is not addressed by Monckton because of his personal agenda: there are 26 Bishops in Parliament, which are NOT elected!”
Well because the CofE is the established church, and has certain legal obligations and duties, its governing laws and regulations are given their final enactment by Parliament This is why the list of Parliamentary actions each year is called “Synod and General Measures” Hence the church has to be given some kind of representation in Parliament to discuss and present its view.
Besides would things improve any if we ditched the Bishops and remaining hereditaries and left the HoL’s revising functions entirely to second rate party hacks who were “bunged upstairs” to shut them up?

“is to distort and disfigure the history of astronomy, of mathematics, of art, of architecture, of philosophy, of poetry. It is more valuable to recognize the good in the traditions of those of other faiths than it is to sneer at them.”
Indeed where would science and mathematics be without algebra and algorithms, but the argument is that since then the Muslim world has been hag-ridden by its clerics and that this has stifled creativity and progress.

“They did not understand the religio-political realities of Scotland – the realities of Rangers vs Celtic”
I liked Billy Connolly’s take on this after a would be jihadi firebomber got the egestate kicked out of him by a ticked off Weegie at Glasgow Airport :
“religious nutters come to Glasgow and dinna bring their ain Fitba team, what a bunch of f*****g amateurs…”
One version of that here:

In all the claims and counter claims about authority and elections. Monckton (In his own words in another thread) claims he was elected by a higher authority. Monckton is cut from the same cloth as Charlie…

“Over the next 18 months, and bearing in mind the urgency of the situation confronting us, the world faces what is probably the last effective window of opportunity to vacate the insidious lure of the ‘last chance saloon’ in order to agree an ambitious, equitable and far-sighted multilateral settlement in the context of the post-2015 sustainable development goals and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
It is the last effective window of opportunity to prepare for a particularly cold run of years from 2016 to 2024. A lot of people will be losing their credibility when it unfolds. The first big cold hit in a growing season is late March to mid June 2016.

Harry Passfield says:
May 31, 2014 at 9:08 am
“PS: Lord M: Do you think that YOU could prevail on Anthony to do something for we Tablet users? Finger-scrolling though 160 comments to get to the point where I can leave a comment is a pain – as is the scroll back to the top”
Make a new bookmark, any url will do
Edit the bookmark url to
javascript:scroll(0,document.body.scrollHeight);
select this url to scroll to the bottom of current document.
javascript:scroll(0,0);
takes you to the top

I had also chosen to use what I consider “bookend” examples of royals and elected officials, rather than to list all possible invasive foreign (to me) threats over my liberty. I would restate it in general terms that though I may be forced to submit, I will never personally consent to abiding by the authority of anyone who I have not had the opportunity to vote for. Yes I know I’m ending that sentence with a preposition – live with it. Thanks again Christopher, I always learn from your posts and enjoy them. You keep us well informed of crazy stuff that we need to be prepared to face..

“Charles’ latest speech, whether he knew it or not, was part of a concerted campaign on the part of the international classe politique to persuade the world, with the active assistance of the sycophantic Marxstream media, to agree to a binding treaty by which sovereign nations would abandon their right to set their own environmental policy and allow a vast, entirely unelected international bureaucracy to rule them all.”
Very wonderful article but is there really any reason to be diplomatic about Prince Charles’ willful and knowing betrayal of his own country, in favor of Brussels’ rule?
UKIP’s Nigel Farage from an article entitled, “I seldom agree with Prince Charles. And I’m not about to start”
“The Prince has given two speeches to the European Parliament in the past: The first and most memorable being when he called for the EU Institutions to have more legislative power. This was based upon his firm belief that climate change is man-made, and only the power of supranational institutions like the EU – with their two parliaments and MEPs knocking up millions of air miles every year – can stop that.
MEPs gave the heir to the throne a standing ovation after that speech, in which he declared that in 10 years’ time we would have no polar ice caps left. Well, that’s seven years ago and I haven’t seen any polar bears drifting down the Thames clinging to life rafts. Nor did I join in the standing ovation at the time, as I did not agree with what the Prince said. I also do not think it is appropriate for the heir to a constitutional monarchy to want to take power away from his mother’s government.”
[MEP is a Member (Elected ???) of Parliment ? .mod]

The “man”, an oxymoron if ever there was one, looks like a chimp. Behaves like one too. He is obviously a regressive evolutionary throwback. No need to get rid of him, just put him in a zoo and feed him bananas. He should be ok there.

It used to be said there would soon be only five kings in the world: spades, hearts, clubs, diamonds, and Buffoons. Charles is the King of Buffoons. There will always be buffoons, right up until the extinction of our species, which will no doubt be the result of some lunacy caused by a group of left wing buffoons like Charles and company.

Mod says, [MEP is a Member (Elected ???) of Parliment ? .mod]
MEP is a Member of European Parliament, which is an elected position in the European Union, with elections being held in each member country for the MEPs.
The European Commission is not elected, and tells the European Union’s parliament what it will “vote” on.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission

I think Monckton is correct on his musing to ditch the Monarchy, although using a scientific site is a strange choice. Still, as long as all unelected positions like Lords, Dukes, Barons and the rest of the silly crew are ditched as well.

http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/about.html
If you haven’t,,,,,, read it entirely,,,, and think of how CO2 fits in.
What do you think they mean with respect to core function #5 on the about page, “knowledge management”? /sarc
I do believe this is on topic……

Gareth Phillips says:
June 1, 2014 at 2:11 pmI think Monckton is correct on his musing to ditch the Monarchy, although using a scientific site is a strange choice. Still, as long as all unelected positions like Lords, Dukes, Barons and the rest of the silly crew are ditched as well.
That’s the hypocrisy of Monckton in full bloom. On the one hand, he trashes the monarchy as having no place in a democracy – even though the role is entirely bully pulpit. Then in the next breath he fights tooth and nail for the right to be called Lord Christopher Monckton, Viscount of Brenchley, a title that is a legacy of …….. the monarchy.

Monckton of Brenchley says: June 1, 2014 at 1:18 am
Yet it is no fairer to say Khayyam was not a Muslim than it is to say that Galileo, for instance, was not a Catholic.
____________________________
We have the same situation in all cases.
Galileo produced original science despite the Catholic Church, not because of it.
Khayyam produced original mathematics despite the Muslim Church, not because of it.
Islam’s Golden Age (if there ever was such a thing) came despite the Muslim Church, not because of it.
The Ahmadiyyas have produced a peaceful creed despite the Muslim Church, not because of it.
Some children avoid being molested despite the Catholic Church, not because of it.
In all cases, the Church is an anchor on advancement, not an engine of advancement.
R

Sparks, insects don’t live long, and climate cooling will effect some more than other. They don’t evolve as such, but move to a better environment within their niche. Bees don’t really like cold weather because of the lack of pollen, and blow flies disappear in winter. It’s the bees we must worry about, because honey and pollen are replaced by sugar for active bees during winter months.

Lord Monckton, actually I don’t dislike Prince Charles and Camilla. He was talking to his plants years ago and so do I, and try to keep harmful chemicals from overuse as fertilizers. This last faux par is silly, and I am sure the UK government doesn’t go along with it. Or they may? I suppose it is an idealistic message and quite honestly other than alarmists it will fall on deaf ears.Sustainability yes, and cutting pollution, yes, but I think he was unwise to event mention climate change in the manner he has. Score one for the IPCC, but all he has done is spark the debate and make skeptics more resolute to overcome the twits who promote nil science that proclaims global temperature rises if we cut down CO2 levels will save the planet.

…his will is not his own;
For he himself is subject to his birth;
He may not, as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends
The safety and the health of the whole state.
Laertes
It was noted earlier in the comments that Charles behaves in a manner similar to that of his great uncle Edward VIII who abdicated the crown to marry the twice divorced Wallis Simpson.
Readers may not be familiar with Christopher’s grandfather, Walter Moncton 1st Viscount of Brenchley, who played a key role as Edward VIII’s advisor in the abdication crisis of 1936.
George V said of his son Edward VIII “after I am dead the boy will ruin himself in 12 months”

Monckton “To sneer at the Muslims for having contributed nothing but violence to civilization is to distort and disfigure the history of astronomy, of mathematics, of art, of architecture, of philosophy, of poetry.”
Omar Khayyam was definitely not a Muslim. It seems that Monckton is incapable of deducing anything from reading his poetry. Nor is he aware of the death penalty under Islamic Sharia law for apostasy, and thus people pretending to be Muslims when they are not, a practice that continues till today in Islamic countries, or the Muslim penchant for usurping and claiming non-Muslims to be Muslims.
The great Persian physician, Al-Razi for example, wrote three books on religion: The Prophet’s Fraudulent Tricks, The Stratagems of Those Who Claim to Be Prophets, and On the Refutation of Revealed Religions, in which he said, among other things, “As for the Koran, it is but an assorted mixture of ‘absurd and inconsistent fables,’ which has ridiculously been judged inimitable, when, in fact, its language, style, and its much-vaunted ‘eloquence’ are far from being faultless.” But Al-Razi has always been claimed by Muslims to be a Muslim.
The Muslim “Golden Age” flowered with their conquests when they conquered and destroyed the flourishing civilisations of Greece, Persia, Egypt and India. When their conquests faltered so did their “Golden Age”.

I think Edward VIII was also trying to make comments about poor people and unemployment reform that the government of the day reckoned he was overstepping his constitutional role and making political comments to gain popular appeal with the masses. Mrs Simpson was a choice and quite honestly she was not liked in UK, not only by the gentry and nobility but also by the Royal Family. A difficult woman whose own interests and questionable morality were sometimes over exaggerated, but she was not exactly the type the British would accept. As one believes that the present monarch is very much admired and Charles represented her at the last Commonwealth of Nations meeting. And of course the present Prince William and Katherine are very much liked. Although my son and I have a debate about young Prince George. All in gud fun mind you, “He’s going to be a grumpy king one day” my son speculates. ” Well we won’t be alive to see that, I think he is lovely!” Organic and sustainable agriculture is every country’s aim, but thank you very much, it should not be overseen by unelected foreigners.

The only problem with the various organic Edens which Prince Charles has willed into existence in his country by sheer ecological purity of mind is that it doesn’t make headlines in the Guardian when the Edens become infested with foreign and domestic pathogens, diseases, and pests and are treated chemically to bring them back under control.
It does make the news occasionally but you have to search for it. Try Eden’s 775,000 Cockroaches.

Oh Lord… (sic!)
I know Watts has a weird obsession with Monckton, but that does not excuse that he can post all sorts of nonsense here.
Yes, the Brits have a monarchy. But NO, unlike what Monckton implies, they do NOT rule. You may not know this, but there are actually elections in this country. The Royals don’t rule. Got that?

The “nonsense” has been posted by you. Our monarch wears the Crown and Reigns over the United Kingdom.
The reality of Royal Power and the UK Constitution were discussed in a previous WUWT thread. People interested in reality can find the start of that discussion here.
Richard

Prince Charles has always wished to appear relevant and to make the monarchy relevant. I think this started out as such but he’s got carried away with himself on this issue.
I think Charles poses a great threat to the monarchy. His comments as to wishing to be the “defender of faith” rather than the “defender of the Faith” is warning enough. This might sound right-on, but could result in a separation of Church and State, and if he keeps shooting his mouth off like he has done then the monarchy might go as part of that process.

ralfellis says:Galileo produced original science despite the Catholic Church, not because of it.
Oh no, not another fallacy. Galileo only argued that observation trumped dogma! His observations of the moons of Jupiter showed that not all things revolved around the Earth adding weight to the Copernicus view of the solar system – a view commonly held by many in the Church, remember Copernicus himself was ordained in Holy Orders. Galileo got into trouble because he wrote several pieces that were insulting to the Pope at the time simply because the Pope refused to acknowledge observation over dogma in this case; and by extension to all others. The whole thing has been mythified, packaged up and sold to the gullible as something else – you seemed to have fallen for it. What is interesting today, is that institutions such as the Royal Society and UN proclaim the superiority of dogma over observation and are applauded for it.
As for your cheap, and glib reference to child abuse would suggest that you care more for making a point than holding the Church to account. BTW the UN has a very, very bad record on sexual abuse also.

Richard says: June 1, 2014 at 11:16 pm
The Muslim “Golden Age” flowered with their conquests when they conquered and destroyed the flourishing civilisations of Greece, Persia, Egypt and India. When their conquests faltered so did their “Golden Age”.
_______________________________
Well said, Richard. Monckton has no idea about the subject, and has been busy on Wiki trying to play catch-up. But he still has no idea. But what really sticks in my gullet is his abject hypocrisy.
Monckton feels himself free to criticise a prince and future king of Britain – and has publicly called for his resignation or abdication – simply because the prince has some rather naive views about science and the environment. Yet Monckton has de-facto refused to make a similar condemnation regarding the Koran’s verses that call for parents to murder their disobedient children (or if they change their religion). Now that is real hypocrisy.
Or is this dhimmitude? (look it up).
.
.
cd says: June 2, 2014 at 3:58 am
Oh no, not another fallacy. Galileo only argued that observation trumped dogma!
______________________________
No. Galileo’s primary crime was demonstrating that the Catholic Church was wrong, and thus not infallible in its pronouncements. In his abjuration he was forced to recant by saying:
Quote:“With sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest my aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect whatsoever contrary to the Holy Church. “
The main problem was the things he said that were “contrary to the Holy Church”. And this is why science can never flourish under the rule of ignorant Catholic or Islamic Churches.
And as an aside, the Heliocentric arrangement of the Solar System had been known long before Galileo’s observations. But it had been suppressed by Catholic ignorance.
One of the most popular symbols of the Roman world was Sol Invictus (the Sun) holding a globe (the Earth) is his (gravitational) grasp. And we know that this globe was the Earth, because in mosaics it is colored blue with some green. Clearly, Galileo was simply proving what had been known for centuries – that the smaller Earth revolved around the more important Sun – but this had been suppressed by the ignorance of the Catholic Church.
Coins of Sol Invictus, holding the Earth.http://www258.pair.com/denarius/images/erf_ri3306.jpghttp://academic.sun.ac.za/antieke/coins/muntwerf/deisolkg.jpghttp://theancientsacredmysteries.com/con1r.jpghttp://www.forumancientcoins.com/moonmoth/sol_pics/gordian_iii_005rf.jpg
R

Christopher Monckton,
This stanza from a poem adds nicely to your post, perhaps.

‘The Walrus and The Carpenter’ by Lewis Carroll (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
. . .
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”
. . .

No. Galileo’s primary crime was demonstrating that the Catholic Church was wrong, and thus not infallible in its pronouncements.
His argument of Heliocentric solar system was well established and wasn’t something unconsidered. The Pope took exception to his writings and not the theory, which was adopted by many in the hierarchy of the Church long before many of his peers in the Academies. You then dream up conflict between ignorant Church and the scientific fraternity, but in truth the Church was one of the main patrons of science during the Renaissance. There were conflicts but this also happened in the Universities and Academies without any need for church input.And this is why science can never flourish under the rule of ignorant Catholic or Islamic Churches.
So the Italian Renaissance didn’t happen when the Church was at the height of its power. You’re talking absolute nonsense.

ralfellis says: “Galileo produced original science despite the Catholic Church, not because of it.”
cd says: June 2, 2014 at 3:58 am: “Oh no, not another fallacy. Galileo only argued that observation trumped dogma! ”
Monckton said: “Yet it is no fairer to say Khayyam was not a Muslim than it is to say that Galileo, for instance, was not a Catholic”
Among the most shameful acts of the Catholic Church was the prosecution of Galileo and among its most shameful documents is the recantation of Galileo, under threat of being burnt at the stake.
The “Islamic” Golden age, which produced scientists and thinkers of great caliber had nothing to do with Islam, just as Galileo’s thoughts and discoveries had nothing to do with Catholicism or religion, but rather with the conquests of many civilisations where such things were already budding along with the liberal Abbasid Caliphate which tolerated things that were non-Islamic.
Many of their greatest examples were not even Muslim like Al-Razi, Avicenna, who rejected the Islamic doctrine of resurrection of the dead in flesh and blood and also rejected religions, including Islam, as lies, Al-Ma’arri, the great Syrian philosopher and poet who wrote “So, too, the creeds of man: the one prevails; Until the other comes; and this one fails; When that one triumphs; ay, the lonesome world; Will always want the latest fairytales.”, Ibn Rushd and Omar Khayyam.
It is ironic that Monckton, who shares many of the characteristics of the “totalitarian prince”, who is about as “totalitarian” or effective as the Red Queen in Alice’s through the looking glass, should argue that Khayyam was a Muslim on the same basis that Galileo was a Catholic.
Maybe Monckton, before criticising the totalitarian prince, should take a good look at himself in the mirror and since he says he is a Christian should read Matthew 7:5 “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

Patrick says: June 2, 2014 at 7:39 am
“Talking about if Islam had an influence on science and discovery one only needs to look at the device used by Muslims to find Mecca in times past. It spawned the sextant. Lets not talk about algebra.”
The modern sextant only came into being with its precursor, the octant, around 1730. Its inventor was John Hadley an Englishman.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hadley
The Arabs used the Astrolabe, which was invented around 150 BC by the Greeks. “metal astrolabes were known in the Christian East well before they were developed in the Islamic world or the Latin West.”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrolabe#Ancient_world
“The roots of algebra can be traced to the ancient Babylonians…The Greeks created a geometric algebra ”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebra#Prehistory_of_algebra
Al-Khwarizmi was a Zoroastrian according to the early Muslim historian Al-Tabari and Omar Khayyam was no Muslim. Modern Algebra was a purely European invention Leibniz and Newton.
“Lets not talk about algebra.” Lets not. Nothing to do with Islam. Unless you can prove it is derived from the Koran or the Hadiths. All that’s derived from those sources are the Al Qaeda and Boko Haram and their ilk.

ralfellis & Richard, you do a discourtesy to Lord Monckton and his readers. I agree with you entirely that one of the chief characteristics of an Empire is that it subsumes the achievements, economies, inventions, and literature of the people it conquers. What it does not steal from its conquered peoples, it obliterates and erases from history. This happened under Rome, and it happened in the 700’s under the spread of Is lam, which unified the scattered tribes into one religion through one language.
However, this totally obvious fact has simply escaped most historians, and the prevailing paradigm in most books dealing with these subjects is to glorify the accomplishments of the conquerors, celebrate their outrageous spending on monumental architecture, and admire their central planning.
Those who hold this accepted view regarding ancient and Medieval history should be challenged, but not insulted.
Besides, the people in European countries have a much higher M slim population and are coping in different ways than people in the US. For example, in the UK there are over 80 Shari-a law courts within its borders. All this aside, it is to be expected that a man of intelligence and good will such as UKIP member Christopher Monckton would seek to find areas of common agreement across cultural lines.

A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines, but by Arab and Jewish scholars. That is, they were not translated from Greek to Latin, but from Greek to Arabic or Hebrew, to Latin. This is to say, the Islamic lingua franca, Arabic, was instrumental in tiding Western Civilization over the “Dark Ages,” and it goes without saying that they delivered Hellenistic science to Europe in a better state than they found it.
One small example: Al Mamun’s estimate of the size of the earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_geodesy
Having created a scientific lingua franca, Islam took a language with hardly any scribal tradition, and mediated a far flung scientific civilization. Since he lived outside that linguistic sphere of influence, the Indian Aryabhata’s doctrine of a rotating earth got no further than Eristarchus’ promulgation of the same, and Europe had to reinvent the wheel. This may be compared with the more recent case of the Japanese Wasaburo Oishi’s discovery of the jet stream, published in what he thought was a lingua franca, Esperanto. His work was only recognized later by historians of science. –AGF

Some speculation: Correct me if I am wrong My Lord, but if the current sovereign were to abdicate and explicitly name a successor from the 2nd generation of issue, would that not pass muster in terms of rules of succession?

RichardAmong the most shameful acts of the Catholic Church was the prosecution of Galileo and among its most shameful documents is the recantation of Galileo, under threat of being burnt at the stake.
Firstly, no one said he had been treated fairly. His position was accepted as long he did not publish his work in common language and that he refrained from presenting it as truth. The problem the Church had was that he argued that truth should be ascertained by observation not on any existing knowledge. That was an open threat to the Pope. At this point he was in the Pope’s favour but he went too far when in part of his writings he made a thinly veiled insult on the Pope’s intelligence. Then the knifes came out. But you’re asserting that the Church was and is anti-science. This is just nonsense. Nearly all the great feats in mathematics and engineering during the Renaissance and before had Church patronage. How on Earth do you think they managed to build massive structures found in the Great Cathedrals, Monasteries, Universities and Palaces of the Church.
You have a world view espoused by the likes of Dawkins that science happened in spite of religion and somehow there is an enmity between them. However, historically some science flourished under Church patronage while others did not. The same thing is happening today but now it is the state that determines what science should be funded and what shouldn’t be.
Some famous priests you might have heard of…
Robert Grosseteste, Ignazio Danti, Marin Mersenne…and on and on including one even honoured by Star Trek: Jean-Felix Picard
BTW Galileo was a devout man, several of his children took Holy Orders.

I bet Charles the Halfwit is exceedingly green… with envy, Juan Carlos has abdicated stating that his forty-something son is mature enough to be king
How old is the halfwit, 65?
He will be the undoing of the mediaeval monarchy, trebles all round.

agfosterjr says: June 2, 2014 at 12:14 pm
A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines, but by Arab and Jewish scholars. That is, they were not translated from Greek to Latin, but from Greek to Arabic.
____________________________
Sorry, agfosterjr, but you have missed the point completely. The Arabic Muslims could not speak Greek, so they got the Syriac Christians of Mesopotamia to translate these texts, because only they spoke Greek, Aramaic and Arabic (with Aramaic being the lingua Franca of Mesopotamia).
And do remember that these Greek texts came from Greco-Syriac lands, not Arabia. When the Muslims conquered and destroyed Christian Amida (Diyarbakir) in Mesopotamia it was found to contain a million books (an exaggeration, I am sure, but you get the idea).
Conversely, this is what Islam gives us – the bald assertion that the Sun revolves around the Earth:
.
This is why Islam cannot do science, because all of the pronouncements of Islamic science must conform with the absurdities and contradictions contained in the Koran. Thus all science in the Islamic Golden Age was done by heretic unbelievers in the lands that Islam had conquered. But after Islam had plundered all the resources of those lands, research, development, prosperity and Islam itself all dissolved back into the sands from whence they came. The destructive fundamentalism of Islam had not only destroyed the Golden Age, it had also destroyed the Persian, Indian, Greek and Syriac Golden Geese that had laid it.
R

cd says:
June 2, 2014 at 12:56 pm
“His [Galileo’s] position was accepted as long he did not publish his work in common language and that he refrained from presenting it as truth.”
False. From the inquisition file in 1616 “..the said Galileo, having been summoned and being present before the said Lord Cardinal, was…warned of the error of the aforesaid opinion and admonished to abandon it; and immediately thereafter…the said Galileo was by the said Commissary commanded and enjoined, in the name of His Holiness the Pope and the whole Congregation of the Holy Office, to relinquish altogether the said opinion that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable and that the Earth moves; nor further to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing; otherwise proceedings would be taken against him by the Holy Office; ..”
He did not present it as the truth. He presented it as an argument between two people in his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”, which he had smuggled and published in the Protestant north.
“But you’re asserting that the Church was and is anti-science.” Of course it is. What is its position on condoms and birth control for example?
PS When you talk about THE CHURCH, you mean the Catholic Church, there are other churches also.
“BTW Galileo was a devout man” I doubt it and even if he was it has nothing to do with with the Catholic Church’s’ anti-science stand which is proven by his prosecution.
“several of his children took Holy Orders.” Irrelevant even if true.
“How on Earth do you think they managed to build massive structures” Building massive structures has been undertaken for reasons other than the pursuit of science. The structures were not as massive as the pyramids of Egypt.
The great scientists of the renaissance Gallileo, Kepler, Newton did not have the patronage of the Catholic Church.

ralfellis says:
June 2, 2014 at 2:12 pm
“Thus all science in the Islamic Golden Age was done by heretic unbelievers in the lands that Islam had conquered.”
==============================
What nonsense. Was the caliph (al-Mamun) a “heretic unbeliever”? –AGF

agfosterjr says:
June 2, 2014 at 12:14 pm
“A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines, but by Arab and Jewish scholars. That is, they were not translated from Greek to Latin, but from Greek to Arabic or Hebrew, to Latin. ”
I have never heard of Greek scientific works being translated from Hebrew to Latin, but as for the claim that “A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines” – it is false.
The Renaissance got an impetus after the fall of Constantinople, after the suicidal charge of its last Emperor Constantine XI with 1,000 Greek soldiers into a force of over 100,000 Turks, which bought time for people fleeing the impending sack of the city along with original Greek works.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Classics

PS – agfosterjr says:
June 2, 2014 at 12:14 pm
“One small example: Al Mamun’s estimate of the size of the earth”
This was simply a copy of what Eratosthenes did over a 1,000 years before him and is a prime example of how scientific works which may have been carried out or commissioned by Muslims are not Islamic.
Anything contrary to the Quran is not Islamic and the Quran clearly says that the Sun has a “resting place” for the night 36:37,38: “A token unto them is night. We strip it of the day, and lo! they are in darkness. And the sun runneth on unto a resting-place for him. ,,” and that the “resting place”of the Sun is in the Earth.
18:84-86, 18:89,90: “and he followed a way until, when he reached the setting of the sun, he found it setting in a muddy spring, ..” “Then he followed a way until, when he reached the rising of the sun, he found it rising upon a people for whom We had not appointed any veil to shade them from it.”

Richard says:
June 2, 2014 at 2:56 pm
agfosterjr says:
June 2, 2014 at 12:14 pm
“I have never heard of Greek scientific works being translated from Hebrew to Latin, but as for the claim that “A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines” – it is false.”
========================================================================
Sorry, but it’s true, and with such statements you merely reveal your profound ignorance and incompetence to be adding your voice here.
1) Learn how to google.
2) Enroll in college.
3) Shut up.
Every thing you say oozed of ignorance and drips with bigotry. Did Genesis anticipate Darwin? Do you expect the Quran to anticipate Copernicus. You are absolutely ridiculous. –AGF

@agfosterjr: June 2, 2014 at 6:04 pm
I have an engineering degree. I would advise you to follow your own advice, but sadly I very much doubt you would make it past primary school. Enrolling in a course of basic English comprehension may do you good, or it may not, as you may not comprehend anything taught to you.
From the link I gave you, which you apparently haven’t followed or haven’t comprehended:
“Greek manuscripts have been maintained in the Greek speaking world in Constantinople, Armenia, Syria, and Alexandria. Interest and availability of Greek text was scarce in the Latin West until with increase traffic to the East, including the Latin Empire during the time of the Crusade, the Sack of Constantinople during the 4th Crusade, and finally the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire caused many of the original Greek manuscripts to make their way into Western Europe, and thus fueled the Renaissance.”
Bigotry is not displayed by knowledgeable people giving reasoned arguments but by ignorant and stupid people saying “shut up” when at a loss for reason.
“Did Genesis anticipate Darwin? Do you expect the Quran to anticipate Copernicus.”
I really don’t know what argument you are trying to raise here. But the Genesis should have “anticipated” Darwin, considering that, many people believe it was the word of God either literal or inspired, and thus should have known that the Earth was not created in 7 days and that Humans and other animals were not “created” in the forms they are.
The case of the Quran is much worse. It is supposed to be the direct word of Allah and he [Allah] is supposed to have created the Earth and the (seven) heavens. The Quran (or Allah in this case) also says that men and other animals were created as they are and the Earth was created in 7 or 8 days (Allah varies his account somewhat). I would certainly expect that if Allah created the Earth and the (seven) heavens, he should have known that the Sun is not a small body that revolves around the Earth and rests for the night, or sets on Earth at night in a muddy spring, or rises from it. Rather forgetful this Allah.

Richard says:
June 2, 2014 at 7:40 pm
You obviously did not read your own link, where you will find: “This work of translation from Islamic culture, though largely unplanned and disorganized, constituted one of the greatest transmissions of ideas in history.”
You seem to suffer from anti-religious bigotry. Consider this: tell me what script you use and I’ll tell you what religion your ancestors were. If it were not for religion you would be illiterate. –AGF

@agfosterjr:
June 2, 2014 at 8:24 pm
[trimmmed]
I stated your claim that “A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines” was false.
Nowhere did I say that Arabs did not translate these works or that these were not used by western Europeans. And as was pointed out these translations were actually done by Greek Christians.
If you had cared to read the next sentence from your quote above “Western Arab translations of Greek works (found in Iberia and Sicily) originates in the Greek sources preserved by the Byzantines.
[trimmed]
[Cut it out. Argue the facts. Only the facts. .mod]

Richard saysFalse.
Copernicus was a canon of the Church for God’s sake.
Jeez…do you understand history at all (written by the victor etc.). Galileo had a number of audiences with the Pope during his work and through his writings (are you going to say that is wrong as well). Conflict arose after he insulted the Pope in his writings (in the book you mention); everything else was just an excuse to punish someone who had the audacity to actually call the Pope stupid. And as with any good politician [Pope] no one brings an enemy to court on the basis of injured pride.
I have read extensively around this and have watched several TV documentaries on this very issue; and even the most ardent proponent of your position always admits it was the Pope’s vanity that was being defended in the end, not the Church’s position.
“BTW Galileo was a devout man” I doubt it and even if he was it has nothing to do with with the Catholic Church’s’ anti-science stand which is proven by his prosecution.
“several of his children took Holy Orders.” Irrelevant even if true.

You see what happens when facts conflict with the narratives you create to support your world view. Surely even you can see the conflict in the above statement.
Again, even when the very physical evidence of the Chruch’s patronage of the sciences (Cathedrals, Palaces, Monasteries) are there for all to see, you state the same mantra and line in denial, denial, denial!The structures were not as massive as the pyramids of Egypt.
So you think in terms of geometry, engineering and sophistication the cathedrals are a step backward from the pyramids.The great scientists of the renaissance Gallileo, Kepler, Newton did not have the patronage of the Catholic Church.
You really are getting desperate – Gallileo and Kepler are said to be post Renaissance or at the cusp of Renaissance science. Newton is post-Renaissance. Please try and get the chronology right.
I gave you list of some clerical scientists and you try to go back to some Dawkinesque caricature of the debate with same old trite arguments. Newton and Kepler were Protestant, both were incredibly religious but since they lived in a protestant country I doubt he’d have been funded by the RC church. Newton’s theological writings are as extensive as his scientific ones.
Try Piero della Francesca for example and his treatise on geometry. One of the many giants of mathematics during the RENAISSANCE.

Newton’s theological writings are more extensive than his scientific. (so I have read) Michael Faraday was also very devout. The age of exploration coincided with the reformation which coincided scientific inquiry. All of it happening in Christendom. Lots a Jews participating. It didn’t happen outside the religious context. It didn’t happen in spite of the religion. It happened because of the Christian religion.

agfosterjr says: June 2, 2014 at 8:24 pm
You seem to suffer from anti-religious bigotry.
__________________________________
Definition of a bigot or a racist – anyone who disagrees with a liberal, or in this case a deist.
Coming back slightly more on topic, I feel it is sad that someone with the intelligence, wit and erudition of Mr Monckton has ruined his entire life and career through his attachment to, and belief in, the unprovable and unbelievable.
It is clear from all I have read that he was dropped from Thatcher’s administration because of his faith-based pontificating, and also from UKIP for the same reason. Likewise he is persona non grata down at Windsor for the same reason. And his every posting on WUWT merely invites bitter divisions and derision, instead of polite debate and discussion.
The guy is a one-man disseminator of discord.
R

Richard says:
June 2, 2014 at 2:56 pm
“I have never heard of Greek scientific works being translated from Hebrew to Latin, but as for the claim that “A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines” – it is false.”
=====================================
Arguing with Richard is like arguing with a warmist. Yes, Richard, many classical works survived by way of Hebrew, mainly from Spain. And many more survived by way of Arabic. I don’t have an exact tally, but I’ll leave it to you to assign some percentage to “large.”
Just about everything you have said is pure nonsense, particularly the claim that the Islamic Enlightenment was not Islamic (first you say it was heretical, now Christian).
Richard says:
June 2, 2014 at 9:24 pm
“If you had cared to read the next sentence from your quote above “Western Arab translations of Greek works (found in Iberia and Sicily) originates in the Greek sources preserved by the Byzantines.”
==============================================
Let me explain: no, the Arabs did not invent these texts; they got them from the Greeks (the Byzantines). And they translated them like crazy. But not all texts survive, in Greek or Arabic. Many that did not survive in Greek did survive in Arabic, and some in Hebrew. And most of these texts were then translated to Latin. How little you know. –AGF

ralfellis at 3:19 says
“…the…Catholic church had neutered science and civilization for more than a 1,000 years.”
=================================================================
More half-witted bigotry. Those texts which did survive in Greek survived in monasteries. So we have one dimwit arguing that Islam contributed nothing to Western Civilization, and another dimwit saying the Church contributed nothing. How then, did Western Civilization survive?
The answer, by way of the clergy. The clerical, that is, the literate. Latin, the language of science, literature, and theology, was kept alive by the Church. The reason I write this in Roman letters is the Church. It is only ignoramuses who discount the role of religion is civilization–only with the European Enlightenment did Church and science part their ways. In every primitive society religion and science were one, and controlled by the state. –AGF

agfosterjr says:
June 3, 2014 at 6:24 am
“Just about everything you have said is pure nonsense, particularly the claim that the Islamic Enlightenment was not Islamic (first you say it was heretical, now Christian).”
I never said that “Islamic” Enlightenment was either “heretical” or Christian, though heretical it may have been. You seem to struggle with comprehension. I said it had nothing to do with Islam, i.e. the teachings of the Quran or the Hadiths. Its inspiration didn’t spring from these sources, but rather from the pagan Greeks and free thought of intelligent people independent of these teachings. And much of the translations were carried out by Christians, who knew Greek as well as Arabic.
Much the same can be said of the Catholic Church. If Catholic monasteries preserved the pagan Greek classics or indulged in science, the credit does not go to Catholicism. Nothing in the Catholic creed demands that Aristotle or the other pagan Greek scientists or science should be venerated, in fact quite the opposite. When science comes up with evidence that is contrary to the scriptures then as has been proven time and again religious people either reject the evidence or struggle to find some new interpretation of the scriptures while preserving their belief in the scriptures. Galileo is a prime example.
@CD “Copernicus was a canon of the Church for God’s sake.” So was Martin Luther. But that’s not the point he didn’t publish his book till just before his death. Being a canon of the Church would not have spared him from being burnt at the stake.
agfosterjr – “Let me explain: no, the Arabs did not invent these texts; they got them from the Greeks (the Byzantines).”
Indeed, then explain this in the light of your explanation “A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines”
The fact of the matter is the Arabic contribution to preserving the Greek scientific works is overblown. The claim that Arabs kept the flame of enlightenment burning without which Europe would have been extinguished in darkness is rubbish. They are ones that destroyed the civilisations in the first place and if you were to study Greek classics would you not want to translate them from the original rather than from translations wherever possible.

Richard at 1:10 says
“Indeed, then explain this in the [sic] light of your explanation ‘A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines'”
====================================
We have to spell out the most minute details for the likes of Richard. Say 100,000 texts are extant, and each text has an average half life of 300 years. The texts have to be hand copied faster than they wear out or are destroyed. Even if most texts are copied every century or two, some will not be, and the original and copies will be lost. So, the Byzantines will have preserved them, but not long enough to survive till the Renaissance. Get it? They are preserved (for a while) but not preserved (for a long enough while). And Islam took up some of the slack. Jeez.
As for the Islamic contribution being “overblown,” I’m afraid you haven’t convinced me you’re an authority on the subject. Rather you have shown you don’t have the slightest notion what you are talking about. You are wasting everyone’s time here. –AGF

agfosterjr says:
June 3, 2014 at 2:34 pm
“So, the Byzantines will have preserved them, but not long enough to survive till the Renaissance. Get it? They are preserved (for a while) but not preserved (for a long enough while). And Islam took up some of the slack. Jeez.”
I’m afraid I dont get it. What you said was “A large share of Greek scientific works were not preserved by the Byzantines, but by Arab and Jewish scholars.
From this I understand that the Byzantines did not preserve most of the Greek scientific works, the Arabs and the Jews did.
But in explaining this you said “Let me explain: no, the Arabs did not invent these texts; they got them from the Greeks (the Byzantines).”
How could they have got it from the Byzantines when the Byzantines didn’t preserve them?
Then you go on further to say ” So, the Byzantines will have preserved them, but not long enough to survive till the Renaissance. Get it? They are preserved (for a while) but not preserved (for a long enough while). And Islam took up some of the slack. Jeez.
Firstly you seem to have some trouble distinguishing between Islam and Muslims, as the Catholics here between Catholics and Catholicism. One are individual humans and the other a creed, belief system or ideology. Islam could have taken up the slack if so commanded by the Quran or the Hadiths. You will have to show me the particular passage which says so.
By your passage above I understand that the Byzantines were trying their level best to preserve the documents but the poor chaps couldn’t keep up, so the kindly Arabs and the Jews stepped in to help out, on the command of Islam, and thus saved the day for the poor ignorant western Europeans who would have otherwise been wandering around with wooden clubs.
But didn’t the Muslims, (on the direct command of Islam), destroy the Byzantine civilisation in the first place? So the poor scribes who were going hell for leather copying these manuscripts were possibly interrupted in their endeavors by having their heads sliced off by Muslims following Islam? Just conjecture on my part – you will have to fill me in.
Or could it be, to put in your words “Just about everything you have said is pure nonsense”?

agfosterjr says: June 3, 2014 at 2:34 pm
So, the Byzantines will have preserved them, but not long enough to survive till the Renaissance. Get it? They are preserved (for a while) but not preserved (for a long enough while). And Islam took up some of the slack. Jeez.
________________________________
But you are completely wrong.
The Arab Muslims could not speak Greek, so it was the Syriac Christians who did the translating and preserving, because they spoke Greek, Aramaic and Arabic.
You also seem to forget that during the Golden Age of Islam, the majority of the population in each region was Christian or Jewish, not Muslim. Arabic Muslims only represented a controlling elite in these regions for many centuries, and so all the administration and donkey work was done by either Christians or Jews.
R

ralfellis says:
June 3, 2014 at 4:36 pm
It’s just amazing how much you know. You have access to an ancient census providing population statistics by religion, languages spoken, ethnicity, you name it. All Christians were trilingual; all Moslems were monolingual. And your definition of Islamic culture? Is it by religion, language, or ethnicity? Everything you write is hopelessly parochial and idiosyncratic. How can one communicate with such an autodidact of so little learning?
When we speak of the Islamic Golden Age we’re talking about the common culture of the Islamic world, defined as the area of Islamic political hegemony where Arabic is at least the language of the elite, if not of the populace. It is true that a comparatively small band of Arabs conquered a huge part of the globe, but the fact is that their language, and an inordinate share of their Y chromosomes, as well as their religion, in the span of about a century spread from Arabia to Mesopotamia, North Africa, Iberia, and later to Anatolia and over to Europe, Indonesia, India and China. The Caliphate sponsored the arts and sciences like no other place in the Western world of the age.
It’s quite true that in some fields Islam added little to Greek, Indian and Persian learning. In other fields they added a great deal. Now I dug out my Charles Singer (“A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900”), and I will pound you with history till doomsday or until you give up all your ridiculous notions about Arabs who couldn’t translate from Greek, or about Arab Christians who still spoke Greek (just when do you think Greek fell out of use?). Because ultimately you are a bigot, and your thinking and writing has much in common with certain other bigots of Aryan infamy. It is shallow, narrow, uninformed, irrational, and worthy of contempt. You have certainly earned mine. –AGF

ralfellis:
June 3, 2014 at 4:36 pm
“It is true that a comparatively small band of Arabs conquered a huge part of the globe”
My god even you know that? Then possibly they were in a small minority among the conquered territories don’t you think O clever one?
“Now I dug out my Charles Singer (“A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900″)” You actually read a book? Good you dug it out as that seems to be your sole source of wisdom and you must be a bit rusty having to dig it out – from where? The mounds of manure you keep?
Have you heard of the Pact of Umar? Which enabled Christians in the Middle east specially to keep their religion?
“After the rapid expansion of the Muslim dominion in the 7th century, Muslims leaders were required to work out a way of dealing with Non-Muslims, who remained in the majority in many areas for centuries. The solution was to develop the notion of the “dhimma”, or “protected person”. The Dhimmi were required to pay an extra tax, but usually they were unmolested. This compares well with the treatment meted out to non-Christians in Christian Europe. The Pact of Umar is supposed to have been the peace accord offered by the Caliph Umar to the Christians of Syria, a “pact” which formed the patter of later interaction.”http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pact-umar.asp
Your great admiration for the Arabs seems to stem in a large part in their sharing a large part of their Y chromosomes. You offered to tell me my ancestry, I think you had better check yours. There is a gene for intelligence and I’m sure there must be one for stupidity also.

Willybamboo:
I write to draw attention to your excellent and factual post at June 3, 2014 at 3:10 am

Newton’s theological writings are more extensive than his scientific. (so I have read) Michael Faraday was also very devout. The age of exploration coincided with the reformation which coincided scientific inquiry. All of it happening in Christendom. Lots a Jews participating. It didn’t happen outside the religious context. It didn’t happen in spite of the religion. It happened because of the Christian religion.

YES! And the same is true of the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam.
People who like to think will think about the religion, politics and physical realities of the world (i.e. society) in which they live.
Sadly, there are some bigots who post to WUWT to display their views which demonstrate that their religious and political biases prevent them from thinking.
Richard

Willybamboo: Newton’s theological writings are more extensive than his scientific. (so I have read) Michael Faraday was also very devout. The age of exploration coincided with the reformation which coincided scientific inquiry. …It happened because of the Christian religion.
richardscourtney; “YES! And the same is true of the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam.”
The Christian religion antedated the the Renaissance and the age of scientific inquiry. If the Christian religion was the cause why didn’t it happen with the introduction of the Christian religion? A large impetus to the age of scientific inquiry was provided by the thoughts of the pagan Greek scientists. How was the Christian religion instrumental in causing the flowering of ancient Greek science? Or of Indian, Chinese or Persian science?
In truth science has always been a secular endeavour and has always been hindered by religion. The same goes for the Golden age of “Islam”. It had nothing to do with Islam.
True Islam, in other words, the following of the teachings of the Quran and the Hadiths was demonstrated by the Caliph Omar who, when he destroyed the great Library of Alexandria said, “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.”
There have been religious rulers both of the Catholic Church and Islam who have been patrons of the arts and science, but arts and science suffered after the deaths of these totalitarian despots, to be replaced by totally religious despots who destroyed what was achieved.
Even Newton and Kepler were hindered by their religious beliefs. Kepler kept searching for orbits as “perfect” circles and Newton tried to think that “God” sometimes interfered in the physical laws (of gravity), for which he was criticised by Leibniz.
In any case his mathematics and scientific thoughts did not spring from the Bible, but from observations and secular thought.

PS Orthodox Islam eventually asserted itself and extinguished the flowering of science in the Muslim world, whereas secularism triumphed over religion in Europe, causing science to grow from strength to strength.
There is little difference between the Taliban, Boko Haram and Caliph Omar, all followers of orthodox Islam.

agfosterjr says: June 3, 2014 at 7:23 pm
All Christians were trilingual; all Moslems were monolingual. And your definition of Islamic culture? Is it by religion, language, or ethnicity?
_________________________________
No, it is by location. The Syriac Christians lived in Aramaic Assyria, but were sandwiched between Greek west and the Arab east. By nature they spoke all three languages. Its like living in Belgium, where you cannot exist without speaking English, Flemish and Walloon.
And why would the conquering Arabs bother learning Pagan Greek, when Arabic was ‘the language of god’? You seem to misunderstand the entire politics and dynamics of a conquering empire.
.
Richard says: June 3, 2014 at 9:34 pm
Have you heard of the Pact of Umar? Which enabled Christians in the Middle east specially to keep their religion?
___________________________
In Syria it was known as the Covenant of Dhimmitude. A Dhimmi being a serf non-believer governed by his Muslim overlords. Jewish and Christian Dhimmis had defined but very restrictive rights. They could not ride horses, could not join the aristocracy, their evidence was worth only 1/2 that of a Muslim, they could not build or repair churches, and they had to pay the Jizya tax that maintained their Muslim overlords. etc: etc: Many more rules other than this.
.
richardscourtney says: June 4, 2014 at 3:15 am
YES! And the same is true of the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam.
Sadly, there are some bigots who post to WUWT to display their views which demonstrate that their religious and political biases prevent them from thinking.
________________________________
The true bigots are those who have to drop the ‘bigot bomb’ as the only way of winning an argument.
The Reformation had nothing to do with religion – quite the reverse. It was a campaign to rid us of the oppressive Catholic Church, and it succeeded, which is why we had the Age of Enlightenment.
And the prime practitioners of the Enlightenment were not Christian. Isaac Newton, for instance, was an pagan alchemist who was described as the ‘Last of the Great Magicians’.http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/sep/11/peopleinscience.guardianweekly
R

Willybamboo: Newton’s theological writings are more extensive than his scientific. It happened because of the Christian religion.
Richard says: June 4, 2014 at 4:56 am
YES! And the same is true of the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam.
________________________________
Rubbish.
Newton was a heretic alchemist in the same mould as Giordanio Bruno. And the Catholic Church burned Bruno alive, as a heretic Pagan. Newton could not have worked under Catholic absolutism and oppression, he would have been burned alive just like the burned Bruno.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
Which is why the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Royal Society, Grand Lodge and the resulting Industrial Revolution were founded and happened AFTER the Catholic Church had been destroyed in Northern Europe.
R

ralfellis says:
June 4, 2014 at 5:10 am
agfosterjr says: June 3, 2014 at 7:23 pm
All Christians were trilingual; all Moslems were monolingual. And your definition of Islamic culture? Is it by religion, language, or ethnicity?
_________________________________
No, it is by location. The Syriac Christians lived in Aramaic Assyria, but were sandwiched between Greek west and the Arab east. By nature they spoke all three languages. Its like living in Belgium, where you cannot exist without speaking English, Flemish and Walloon.
==================================================================
Singer: “The Syriac language had, from the third century, replaced Greek in Western Asia.” He allows: “The classical dialect was not wholly unknown to the educated class” (p.140). Pp.141-2: “As time went on Arabic began to replace Syriac for scientific and medical works. Just as 750 to 850 was the century of translation into Syriac, so 850 to 950 was the century of translation into Arabic.”
What we had was displaced Christian scholarly heretics who had settled in Persia and learned Classical Greek, which by that time differed substantially from the Byzantine Greek, and which by then had shrunk to nearly its present boundaries.
You: “And why would the conquering Arabs bother learning Pagan Greek, when Arabic was ‘the language of god’?”
==============================
For the same reason that the Europeans translated from Arabic to Latin: to learn. And when texts were available in both Greek and Arabic, the Arabic versions were preferred for their superiority and intelligibility. Singer (pp.159f):
“The question is often asked why in the Middle Ages the practice was to translate works from the Arabic rather than from the Greek, and why this tendency affected works originally written in Greek. The reasons may be set forth thus:
“(a) Before about 1200 Moslem learning was better organized, more original, more vital than the Byzantine.
“(b) Byzantine Greek is far distant from the classical tongue. The language of Aristotle was incomprehensible to the monastic guardians of his manuscripts. But classical Arabic was intelligible to every well-educated man who spoke and wrote Arabic.
“(c) The whole trend of Byzantine learning was to theology and away from philosophy and science.
“(d) The channels of trade with the West were either direct with Islam or through Western enclaves within the Byzantine Empire.
“(e) In the Middle Ages languages were learned by speaking and not from grammars. Spoken Arabic was moe accessible than spoken Greek.
“(f) Latin Christendom made little progress in occupying Byzantine territory. On the other hand, Islam was in retreat in the West.
“(g) Jewish help could be obtained for Arabic, but seldom for Greek.”
How refreshing it is to read someone who actually knows what he’s talking about. –AGF

ralfellis says:
June 4, 2014 at 5:45 am
Which is why the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Royal Society, Grand Lodge and the resulting Industrial Revolution were founded and happened AFTER the Catholic Church had been destroyed in Northern Europe.
=======================================================================
One would think from reading such ignorant bigots that France played no part in the Enlightenment, or that the likes of Calvin never executed heretics in Switzerland. To help put in context ralfellis’ drivel, consider the late dates at which the Protestant states adopted the Gregorian Calendar. This was a case of rejecting good science because it was associated with the authority of the Church. And Pope Gregory depended on Copernicus and Copernicus depended on the Arab al-Battani’s calculations. –AGF

“The reformation had nothing to do with religion – quite the reverse” I’m astonished you wrote that, R! History has a more nuanced and complex view of “Catholic absolutism and oppression”. The persecuted victims during the reformation were mostly like the Anabaptists in the Spanish Netherlands who had no prince to protect them. They weren’t scientists.
Maybe you can explain away Da Vinci and Aquinas and the other great minds that flourished in medieval Italy and created the basis for the age of inquiry. Those minds obviously arise out of a distinctly Christian milieu. It didn’t happen in China or Istanbul. My guess is the weakness and the diversity of the Roman Catholic monolith, not its oppressive power, made it possible. There is a spark of freedom in the Christian religion that is hard to extinguish: As St. Paul said; Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Independent thinking and inquiry is part of the Jesus package. It was what got him into trouble. BTW, Sir Isaac Newton, disagrees with you characterizing him as a pagan. Read what he wrote. Don’t post articles from the Guardian to prove your point and expect your credibility to rise.

Richard says:
June 3, 2014 at 9:34 pm
ralfellis:
June 3, 2014 at 4:36 pm
========================================
Of course Richard gets the names wrong, but that’s easy for those less confused than he. Anyone who thinks the issue at hand is the scientific authority of the Koran, is best ignored. His arguments are akin to denying the progress of modern Chinese science because of China’s depostic government. –AGF

ralfellis says:
June 4, 2014 at 5:10 am
Newton was not pagan. He was Unitarian, ie he believed that the Christian God was One, not Three Persons, the orthodox Trinitarian article of faith. So he was a secret Christian heretic, not a pagan.
As for Medieval use of Arabic v. Greek translations, IMO an important reason is that before the Renaissance, Greek manuscripts were rare in the West, & few scholars could read them. By contrast, in places such as Spain & Sicily, there were scholars who knew both Arabic & Latin. Even today, the Maltese language is based upon the Arabic once spoken in Sicily.
After the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, more Greek manuscripts & speakers became available in Western Europe, stimulating the Humanist movement based upon improved classical scholarship. This in fact was an important impetus behind the birth of modern science. Copernicus was able to learn Attic Greek, so could read the newly available works of ancient scientists in their original language.

ralfellis says:
June 4, 2014 at 5:10 am
“The Reformation had nothing to do with religion”
That is wrong. It had everything to do with religion. Christianity was reformed and became more humane and tolerant eventually.
“Isaac Newton, for instance, was an pagan alchemist”
Isaac Newton was a devout Christian, though as described by milodonharlani a “heretic”. All religious people so describe each other who do not subscribe to their compartmentalised beliefs.

agfosterjr says:
June 4, 2014 at 7:59 am
“Anyone who thinks the issue at hand is the scientific authority of the Koran, is best ignored.”
A strawman fallacy is when you construct a falsehood that has never been said by an opponent and then proceed to refute it. Though in your case this is probably not deliberate, but just a failure to understand very simple English and logic.
“..is best ignored.” – Very wise. You are out of your depth. It has at last dawned on you that it is better to keep one’s mouth shut and let people think you’re a fool than to open it and remove all doubt, sadly too late as the damage has been done.

Richard says:
June 2, 2014 at 3:37 pm
“Anything contrary to the Quran is not Islamic and the Quran clearly says that the Sun has a “resting place” for the night 36:37,38: “A token unto them is night. We strip it of the day, and lo! they are in darkness. And the sun runneth on unto a resting-place for him. ,,” and that the “resting place”of the Sun is in the Earth.”
And responds to this: “Anyone who thinks the issue at hand is the scientific authority of the Koran, is best ignored.”
with this:
Richard says:
June 4, 2014 at 11:40 am
“A strawman fallacy is when you construct a falsehood that has never been said by an opponent and then proceed to refute it. Though in your case this is probably not deliberate, but just a failure to understand very simple English and logic.”
So that we are only left to wonder, is he so perfectly witless or so perfectly dishonest to make no connection between the two paragraphs.
And when Richard says:
June 1, 2014 at 11:16 pm
“The Muslim “Golden Age” flowered with their conquests when they conquered and destroyed the flourishing civilisations of Greece, Persia, Egypt and India. When their conquests faltered so did their “Golden Age”.”
..we merely have the rantings and ravings of one of the most intellectual deprived and pathetic commentators to ever grace the pages of WUWT. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. We call these integers Arabic numerals because Islamic Culture did us the favor of learning them from the Hindus and teaching them to the Christians. Even this goes over poor Richard’s head. Poor, poor, Richard.
–AGF

William Abbott says: June 4, 2014 at 7:58 am
Maybe you can explain away Da Vinci and the other great minds that flourished in medieval Italy and created the basis for the age of inquiry.
___________________________
Because his patron was one of the Borgias, and the Borgias were perhaps the most debauched and non-Catholic of all the popes.
R

Richard C, if you think about it (excuse the pun) science should be inquiry outside the parameters of religion or political restrictions or dogma imposed on us. One of analysis, observation and experiment. We can’t see CO2, but we can see the effects of pollution. How can AGWs just look at temperatures to assess the climate? And the causation factors that create climate change. But there have been many instances in history, when scientific rationalizations have been deliberately ignored and suppressed for political or religious agendas. Or exaggerated as there is no other possible explanation. Such as the immaculate conception. Jesus’ resurrection. In fact it was an interesting point put out by one historian, that the Jewish sects were in turmoil amongst one another, and without these mysteries surrounding Jesus’ existence, they would not be understood or believed by the masses. In fact one stipulated the Christian church would not have survived Jesus, a Jew, without St.Paul. Or of course Constantine 1. (He legalized Christianity because it brought in more taxes perhaps but was only baptized on his death bed). All these alarmists are doing is corrupting the data to fit their hypothesis. Nothing new about that.

Willybamboo:
I write to draw attention to your excellent and factual post at June 3, 2014 at 3:10 am

Newton’s theological writings are more extensive than his scientific. (so I have read) Michael Faraday was also very devout. The age of exploration coincided with the reformation which coincided scientific inquiry. All of it happening in Christendom. Lots a Jews participating. It didn’t happen outside the religious context. It didn’t happen in spite of the religion. It happened because of the Christian religion.

YES! And the same is true of the ‘Golden Age’ of Islam.
People who like to think will think about the religion, politics and physical realities of the world (i.e. society) in which they live.
Sadly, there are some bigots who post to WUWT to display their views which demonstrate that their religious and political biases prevent them from thinking.

At June 4, 2014 at 5:10 am you here replied

The true bigots are those who have to drop the ‘bigot bomb’ as the only way of winning an argument.
The Reformation had nothing to do with religion – quite the reverse. It was a campaign to rid us of the oppressive Catholic Church, and it succeeded, which is why we had the Age of Enlightenment.
And the prime practitioners of the Enlightenment were not Christian. Isaac Newton, for instance, was an pagan alchemist who was described as the ‘Last of the Great Magicians’.http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/sep/11/peopleinscience.guardianweekly

Thankyou for providing so clear a demonstration that I was right when I wrote,
“Sadly, there are some bigots who post to WUWT to display their views which demonstrate that their religious and political biases prevent them from thinking.”
Richard

agfosterjr has learnt nothing and continues to put his mouth in it.
Imagine the level of intelligence of a person who claims he can deduce your ethnicity from the script you use, a script that is used by humans of just about every race, colour and creed on the planet, yet fails to deduce what script you are using after corresponding with you in that script.
I guess it’s a fool’s prerogative to display his stupidity.
agfosterjr – “His arguments are akin to denying the progress of modern Chinese science because of China’s depostic(sic) government.”
Another display of abysmal stupidity.
Does the Chinese Govt declare scientific belief as part of its ideology like Islam? (or for that matter Catholicism or Christianity?) Does it declare that the Earth is Flat or the Sun moves around the Earth or sets in a muddy spring? Does it say that the Earth and the stars were created in 7 days and the animals and humans were created as they are and not evolved? Does it moreover say that these beliefs and other such beliefs in the realm of science are sacrosanct for all time and any disbelief in them will incur the death penalty on account of blasphemy? How far would Chinese science progress with restrictions like that?
Does not even a moron realise that the term “Islamic Science” is oxymoronic? That religion intrudes into the realm of science with miracles, revelations and myths, and declares these myths as absolute truths for all time? And by so doing so impedes the progress of science?

Richard says:
June 5, 2014 at 3:43 am
Poor retarded Richard continues with BS. I didn’t say native script reveals ethnicity, although there is some truth to that too. I said, tell me what script you use and I’ll tell you what religion your ancestors were. And that’s true about 90% of the time. Of course we have exceptions such as the Turks, whose Arabic script was abolished by Ataturk, but the rule holds generally. And of course it shows the extent to which our literacy is indebted to the clergy. Little does Poor Richard know that the old legal phrase “benefit of clergy,” referred to the right of the literate (or those who could feign literacy) to avoid capital punishment because of their usefulness. The clergy were so called because they were literate. And as I said, the reason I write this in Roman letters is because of the Roman Church. All this goes over Poor Richard’s head. And yes, the Hindus use Sanskrit, and the Orthodox use Greek or the derived Cyrillic, and the Catholics and Protestants use the Roman script, and the Moslems use the Arabic script. And Philipinos use Roman letters and Indonesians use Arabic script and Buddhists use Kanji, and so on. All this regardless of the spoken language used.
But wait–he does get something right: I misspelled ‘despotic.’ Sadly that’s the only thing he gets right. Poor retarded Richard seems to think Moslems believe the earth is flat because the Koran says so. All this after trying to teach him about al-Mamun’s efforts to measure the size of the earth. I suppose Poor Retarded Richard thinks al-Mamun was measuring the curvature of a flat earth.
And that’s about all the time I will waste on Poor Retarded Richard. He will no doubt get the last word in, still thinking he is not retarded. At least his writing instructs us of the extent to which bigotry, ignorance, and downright retardation, are connected. Poor, poor, Richard. –AGF

agfosterjr : “I said, tell me what script you use and I’ll tell you what religion your ancestors were.”
Certainly not the wisest fool in Christendom by a long shot. Would figure quite low on that list.
Ancestry doesn’t stop at the first ancestor who may have been a Christian. The Italian, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini, otherwise known as Pope Paul VI used the Latin Script, what religion did his ancestors follow? Julius Caesar also used the Latin Script what were his ancestors’ religion?
Talking of Chimpanzees, the next time you visit your cousins in the Zoo ask them what was the religion of your common ancestor.
“I suppose .. al-Mamun was measuring the curvature of a flat earth.”
Not the brightest of sparks are you?
Al-Mamun commissioning astronomers to duplicate the experiment of Eratosthenes made over 1,000 years earlier, was indulging in science. He was an absolute ruler with his own character, whims, fancies, interests and hobbies. He was aware, through Greek sources, that the Earth was round and that the Sun did not set in the Earth.
Islam is a religion and an ideology. Like all religions and ideologies, it has its own explanations of cosmology, the origins of the Earth and life, its own myths and legends which are incompatible with science. It defends its ideology through force and the threat of force, commanded in its scriptures against disbelief. Just like the Catholics did earlier.
The science commissioned by Al-Mamun was not Islamic. There is no such thing as “Islamic science”. Science is not religious, by its very nature it cannot be. You cannot seem to grasp this simple concept.
“Al-Ma’mun’s relations with Byzantines are marked by his efforts in the translation of Greek philosophy and science. Al-Ma’mun gathered scholars of many religions at Baghdad, whom he treated magnificently and with tolerance. He sent an emissary to the Byzantine Empire to collect the most famous manuscripts there, and had them translated into Arabic. As part of his peace treaty with the Byzantine Emperor, Al-Ma’mun was to receive a number of Greek manuscripts annually, one of these being Ptolemy’s astronomical work, the Almagest”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ma%27mun#Wars_with_Byzantium

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